WILKES-BARRE, Pa. (AP) - In a cramped office at the Luzerne County Courthouse, Detective Chaz Balogh started the week by studying a pair of disturbing reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
There was a report of someone using Dropbox to share images and videos of a young boy engaged in sex acts, in one case with his legs, wrist and neck bound.
The other case involved a video posted to YouTube portraying young children engaged in inappropriate conduct, including exposing themselves. Balogh says he wants to know who put it online. And what else is going on in that house.
“It’s very abnormal for kids that age to do those things,” Balogh said. “It would be very hard for me to believe that they uploaded it, but who knows?”
It was the start of a typical day for Balogh, 47, who is the first Luzerne County detective to specialize in investigating cyber crimes. He investigated the first child porn case in county history to go to trial, joining Assistant District Attorney Jenny Roberts in winning the first guilty verdict rendered by a jury in such a case here.
But his work transcends investigating child porn cases.
He was involved in the double-murder case against Hugo Selenski, and memorably came up with two key witnesses mid-trial in the case against former Coughlin High School dean of students Stephen Stahl - witnesses the defense said “completely changed the playing field” and helped convict Stahl of having a sexual relationship with a student.
With hair shaved into a military high-and-tight style, Balogh works from a small cubicle in the courthouse basement surrounded by motivational quotes such as “We’re here because they’re out there” and “We work for God.” Also looking down on him at his desk are pictures of his daughter, now 18, who Balogh says has been a driving force behind his work.
Because of what he sees every day, Balogh said he closely tracks her online activities and has “put stuff on her devices” to protect her. Her friends might say it’s weird, but Balogh says his daughter understands.
“I feel that you can never be an overprotective parent, because of what I see,” Balogh said. “I always tell her, ’Listen, I can only tell you how this upsets me, because I see it every day. I don’t want you to ever be a part of that.’”
Early aspirations
A lifelong resident of Luzerne County, Balogh said he was always interested in a career in law enforcement. As a child, neighborhood kids would poke fun at him for making siren sounds while riding his Big Wheel tricycle, he said.
But, inspired by family members in law enforcement as well as neighbor and Wilkes-Barre police officer Brian Lavan, Balogh was determined to have a career as a lawman.
“He always had that zeal to be a law enforcement officer,” said Lavan, now the director of police operations for the Wilkes-Barre Area School District. “(When) I was in the cruiser and I’d see him, he would always want to talk about police work and things like that. He always had that desire.”
As a young man, Balogh joined the U.S. Coast Guard with plans to spend a career busting up crime on the high seas. But then he was injured in a crash and found himself out of a career.
“A drunk driver interrupted my life,” Balogh said. “But you know, everything happens for a reason. I’m a firm believer of this, because I’m doing pretty good in life right now.”
In 1989, he landed a job with the Luzerne County Sheriff’s Office. He liked working as a deputy, but he said he wanted to do more than serve documents and escort prisoners.
Balogh enrolled in police academy and after graduating began working part time as an officer in Luzerne borough.
In January 2000, Balogh got a job as a community service officer, helping to educate the public about safety issues, for the district attorney’s office under David W. Lupas, who is now a county judge.
Over the years he worked part-time in several other municipalities, getting his first real taste of cyber crime policing in White Haven, he said.
It was 2007, and Balogh had been posing as a 14-year-old in an online chat room when Scranton resident Jay Hastings expressed a desire to “have all kinds of sexual intercourse” with him, he said. Their meeting at the Wyoming Valley Mall drew widespread attention because of Hastings’ employment as the backup “Grump” mascot for the former Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.
Police later discovered four child victims as well as child porn on Hastings’ computer, Balogh said. Hastings later pleaded guilty in the case and was sentenced to 11 to 27 years in prison.
“That was just the start for me,” Balogh said. “’Wow, this is a pretty interesting line of work.’ That was a big case.”
The “Grump” character was swiftly retired, but Balogh was just getting started.
When former district attorney Jackie Musto Carroll took office in 2008, she promoted Balogh to detective and assigned him to begin investigating computer crimes - a specialty that was new to the office, he said.
“She gave me the opportunity of a lifetime,” Balogh said.
Musto Carroll said Balogh was enthusiastic and interested in investigating computer crimes and wasn’t afraid to learn new things. He seemed to see an opportunity to distinguish himself as a law officer and was a great fit for the emerging field, she said.
“The type of work that he does can be gut-wrenching,” Musto Carroll said. “Many police officers and detectives have a hard time dealing with that, and I think you need to be a special person to deal with it. … Chaz is so passionate about it, but he’s able to separate that from his own life.”
Not a nine-to-five job
When District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis took office in 2012, she wanted to focus on targeting abuse of children and told Balogh he would essentially have “free reign” to do his work. They would discuss how to proceed on cases, but she didn’t want him held back by the clock or other constraints, she said.
“You want to make sure that you’re getting on these cases as soon as possible. A minute or an hour can make a difference to a child that’s being abused,” Salavantis said.
Many law officers want nothing to do with child porn cases, and those who work them often get burned out quickly, she said. Yet Balogh has been at it for about eight years, sacrificing his personal time and frequently being the last to leave the office at night, she said.
Last weekend, for instance, Balogh got three calls from local police for assistance and helped each of them, he said.
“It’s not just a Monday-through-Friday job,” Balogh said, acknowledging his family has sacrificed much because of his work. “I always catch myself apologizing to my family because sometimes I’ve put my job ahead of them. It bothers me a little bit because everyone says there’s tomorrow. Sometimes today’s the day to save the kid.”
One of the calls was from Nanticoke police Detective Sgt. Joseph Guydosh, who needed help forensically examining cellphones of three local teens. A 15-year-old boy had been messaging two younger girls pictures of his penis. When one called him a “disgusting, fat pig,” the teen replied “now I want to (expletive) you.”
“Normally I would say boys will be boys,” Guydosh said as Balogh began downloading pictures and texts from the boy’s phone using a Cellebrite forensic extraction device he keeps in the back of his car for quick access.
“No, that’s bull (expletive). Don’t even say that,” Balogh said. “Yeah, kids will be kids. Then they start sending the pictures all over the school.”
Balogh retrieved hundreds of photos and messages from the teens’ phones, and noted as he began reviewing them that the boy, despite his aggressive come-ons, had gotten girls to send him pictures.
“If my daughter sent that to someone, I’d kill her,” Balogh said of a photo of a young teen wearing a revealing tank top.
Eventually, Balogh found photos of the boy’s penis on a girl’s phone and corresponding images on the boy’s own phone.
“All right, we have him,” Balogh said. “There’s his face.”
With the evidence in hand, Balogh planned to write up a report Guydosh could use to file charges against the boy. Because of a change to the law in recent years aimed at protecting minors from being charged with distributing child pornography, the boy would be cited for teen sexting, a summary offense.
Balogh acknowledged forensics is time-consuming and a lot of work to bring charges that essentially amount to a traffic ticket.
“But you never know what it’s going to turn into,” he said.
’Where are mom, dad?’
Despite his tough exterior, the work does sometimes get to Balogh. In May, after he and Roberts won a guilty verdict in the county’s first child porn trial, Balogh got visibly emotional outside the courtroom as he recalled how jurors began crying when shown images that, in Roberts’ words, “will haunt you - forever.”
“It really got to him, and we talked about it for a while,” Salavantis said. “But he doesn’t let that emotion come out very often.”
Recalling the case of a King’s College professor convicted last year of possessing and disseminating child porn, Balogh said he felt bad about disrupting what he termed a “beautiful family.”
“I go in, I turn people’s lives upside down. There’s nothing satisfying about that,” Balogh said. “It’s actually heartbreaking. It’s bad enough that we’re seeing horrific things, we go and disrupt a whole family who maybe believed everything was great.”
He also sounded a bit frustrated that even after he spent years working as a community service officer - years spent spreading the word about how to stay safe, including on the Internet - the message doesn’t always seem to resonate.
Every month, he receives anywhere between 10 to 30 crime tips, and those don’t include the cases he makes by searching peer-to-peer sites for people who are sharing child porn, he said. Cyber police are overwhelmed by the caseload - the state police Northeast Computer Crime Task Force, which covers 17 counties, has only four investigators - and have to “do as much as we can as fast as we can,” Balogh said.
“I just wish parents would listen sometimes to what I’m trying to put out there. Like I got that case (Monday),” he said, referencing the YouTube video. “That’s just going to drive me crazy with these two kids. Because where are mom and dad? Now they’re victims. The sad part is, somewhere someone is going to get sexually gratified by watching that video, which is absolutely disturbing.”
While that case was still pending Thursday - Balogh was awaiting information so he could identify the user - he had solved the other child porn case that started his week. The task force charged a man with possessing hundreds of child porn pictures, including some of infants and toddlers being raped.
Balogh said people sometimes question why police don’t go after the people making such images. His response is that they do. In the past few years, the task force has saved a number of victims by finding porn online, arriving at the address and recognizing the rooms or children from what they watched on a computer screen, he said.
Even when they don’t stop a producer, they could be preventing a child from being molested later on, he said.
“I always feel like I’m doing God’s work, getting these people away from our kids,” Balogh said. “At the end of the day, my goal is to make sure every kid’s safe.”
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Information from: The Citizens’ Voice, https://www.citizensvoice.com
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