PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia Daily News
STEPHANIE FARR, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER FARRS@PHILLYNEWS.COM, 215-854-4225
A CHESTER COUNTY priest who has been charged with posting child pornography to Instagram admitted during questioning that he’d once posed as a teenage girl online to engage in a relationship with a 14-year-old girl, according to court documents.
When Chester County detectives received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding two photos of a naked, underage girl that were posted to Instagram in April, they tracked the IP address to Ss. Simon and Jude Parish in West Chester.
Believing a student at the parish may have posted the photos, detectives interviewed the pastor who informed investigators that the email address associated with the Instagram account in question, “irishwit2@gmail.com,” actually belonged to the Rev. Mark Haynes, 55, a priest who lived at the rectory, prosecutors said.
When questioned by police on Thursday, Haynes admitted that he had received about 100 images of child porn on Instagram and had sent about 50 pornographic images of children to others, according to court documents.
Haynes referred to the images as ” ‘lascivious pictures or videos of minors,’ ” police said.
He then allegedly admitted to detectives that in 2010, he joined a dating site pretending to be a 16-year-old girl and began communicating with a 14-year-old girl.
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