UPDATE: All charges – aside from one misdemeanor count of corruption of minors – were withdrawn by prosecutors at a preliminary hearing.
Original story:
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A Middletown man has been charged following a September incident where alleged sexually explicit messages to a 17-year-old boy.
Joseph Mazurek, 33, was charged Friday with a number of felonies including unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, criminally attempting to obtain child pornography, dissemination of explicit material to minors and a misdemeanor charge of corruption of minors.
Middletown police said they were drawn to Mazurek when a 17-year-old boy and a group of his friends were outside of Mazurek’s residence on Alscot Lane yelling at the house. The boy indicated to the responding officer that the reason the group was berating the house and Mazurek was the disturbing messages the suspect had allegedly sent to him.
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The messages, in which Mazurek appeared to ask the victim for sexually explicit images and videos, were shown to the officer at the scene, according to court papers.
Police officers spoke with Mazurek on the matter. He explained that while the messages did come from his Facebook account and from his device, but he did not send them, authorities said.
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Mazurek went further to explain to police that the only other electronic device in the home that he uses is a tablet, which Mazurek claimed could not even connect to the internet, court documents stated. Mazurek surrendered the tablet to investigators, and over the following weeks, internal searches were conducted after a search warrant was granted by District Judge Daniel Baranoski.
The extracted information from the phone and tablet searches indicated that Mazurek’s tablet was capable of connecting to the internet and had done so recently. The metadata retrieved from the phone corroborated the victim’s report that the initial messages came on September 7, police said.
Mazurek was arraigned and held on 10 percent of $75,000 bail.
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Editor’s Note: All individuals arrested or charged with a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The story was compiled using information from police and public court documents.
