KYLERTOWN – A Winburne man was jailed Thursday on child pornography charges.
Dennis Allen Nearhood, 65, has been charged by the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General with 20 felony counts of child pornography and one felony count of criminal use of communication facility.
According to the affidavit of probable cause, the AG’s Child Predator Section opened the case Sept. 15, 2023 after a cyber tip was received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
The tip was generated Aug. 6, 2023 by BingImage after a user accessed its service and uploaded 11 suspected images of child pornography.
NCMEC distributed 34 additional cyber tips for user uploads that occurred between Feb. 21, 2023 and Oct. 25, 2023, resulting in the discovery of approximately 277 suspected images of child pornography.
The IP address was the same in every generated tip, investigators said, adding it was assigned to Zito Media and ultimately traced to Nearhood’s address.
On Feb. 22, investigators—along with Pennsylvania State Police—executed a search of Nearhood’s residence. At that time, he allegedly admitted to having viewed child pornography multiple times on his desktop computer.
But, he denied having saved any of the child sexual abuse material. He did admit there could be some on the device, saying he deletes it upon viewing so it doesn’t slow down his computer.
Nearhood said he’d viewed images of children as young as two years old and estimated this occurred at least twice a week.
He claimed that he wasn’t actually “seeking it out,” but that it just “popped up” while he was viewing adult pornography.
“A certified forensics examiner from the AG’s office completed a preview examination of [Nearhood’s] computer, and located numerous images of child sexual abuse, as well as keywords associated with searching for images of the abuse,” the affidavit states, and 20 files were copied for investigative purposes.
Currently Nearhood is scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing March 6 during centralized court. He’s being held in county jail unable to post $100,000 bail.
