A former Pennsylvania State Police dispatcher from Whitehall Township will spend the next few years on probation for sharing child pornography online.
Tyler Lee Graumenz, 24, was sentenced to five years of probation today by Lehigh County Judge Kelly Banach. Graumenz, who has been free on 10 percent of $10,000 bail, faced a maximum of seven years in prison.
Graumenz will have his computer usage monitored by probation officials and will also have to register as a sex offender under the state's Megan's Law.
Graumenz pleaded guilty back in December to a felony count of possession of child pornography. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped charges of criminal use of a communication facility and sending or receiving obscene or sexual materials via computer.
Graumenz, of the 3000 block of South Second Street, was arrested in August after police said he shared at least six child porn videos online, including one depicting a 9-year-old girl having sex with an adult male.
Graumenz was a dispatcher at the state police station in Lehighton starting in March 2013 and was terminated three days before his arrest.
The videos were discovered during an Allentown Police Department investigation of computers whose users were sharing images of child sexual assaults on the Internet, authorities said.
An officer used software to query searches on a network for known codes for images when he established a connection with a computer sharing six child pornography files, police said. That computer was tracked to Graumenz's home, and a consent search of one of his two computers turned up a folder of pornographic files.
