A Moon resident is headed to court on charges that he planted a hidden camera on a toilet to film a 12-year-old girl showering, and also possessed pornographic images of other children.
Justin James Stokes, 34, waived his preliminary hearing Tuesday morning and is set to be arraigned in Common Pleas court Dec. 14, court records show. He’s in Allegheny County Jail on $250,000 bail.
Attorney Frank Walker, who represents Stokes, was not immediately available for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Stokes told Allegheny County Police earlier this month that “he wanted to tell the truth” and confessed to planting a “minicamera” he bought on Amazon on a toilet to record the girl, according to a criminal complaint in the case. He downloaded images from the camera on “three or four occasions” between spring 2022 and this fall.
“Stokes stated that he was so upset with himself he destroyed the camera after the last recording,” Allegheny County Police Detective Scott Klobchar wrote in his report. “Stokes advised us that he saved the recordings, as well as additional child pornographic material, in a secure passcode-protected folder on his cellular telephone.”
A folder on Stokes’ cellphone labeled “Downloads” contained 53 images and eight videos, the complaint said. Several of the files were pornographic in nature.
Another folder, labeled “Screenshots,” featured at least three images of the 12-year-old girl in the shower and at least one of the girl in a bedroom, the complaint said.
The complaint is unclear about where he planted the camera. TribLIVE does not identify victims of sex crimes.
Police confronted Stokes after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told authorities it received a “cybertip” about child pornography being uploaded to a Verizon cloud account from Stokes’ cellphone, the complaint said.
Allegheny County Police charged Stokes on Oct. 18 with seven counts of child pornography, four counts each of invasion of privacy and recording a child depicting a sex act, and one count of criminal use of a communications facility, court records show.
All of the charges are headed to Common Pleas court, records show. At least 12 of the charges are felonies.
