Local law enforcement officers lauded
LEAD awards acknowledge stellar service
FBI Agent Gregg Frankhouser hunts predators.
On Friday, he and a team of officers won an award for catching one.
Agent Frankhouser and three other members of the Western Pennsylvania Violent Crimes Against Children Task Force were honored during the annual Law Enforcement Agency Directors awards ceremony for their investigation of Robert Roy Hegner, 67, a convicted pedophile from Sewickley. The ceremony was held at the federal courthouse, Downtown. Agent Frankhouser and the team worked a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2016 that someone using the moniker “Chapstep” was uploading child pornography from an IP address in the Pittsburgh area.
The task force tracked the address to Hegner at a house on Charette Place, a quiet street a block from Quaker Valley High School.
A background check showed Hegner was a Megan’s Law offender stemming from a 1999 molestation case of two children, for which he went to prison.
A search of his house and computers in August 2016 turned up more than 1,000 child porn images. He admitted the porn was his and that he couldn’t stop collecting it.
During a polygraph exam, he also told the FBI team that he had molested 25 other children over the years.
Agent Frankhouser said the team was unable to prosecute him for those crimes because they could not identify some of the victims or, for those they could, the cases were too old.
But the child porn was enough to put Hegner away. In February he was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, followed by a lifetime of probation. He’ll be 80 when he gets out.
Agent Frankhouser, a 51-yearold Beaver Falls native who specializes in child sex cases in the Pittsburgh office and previously in New York, said he still feels satisfaction in catching predators
like Hegner.
Going out with a search warrant to uncover a pedophile’s secret world is always illuminating.
“You never know what’s behind that door,” he said.
While investigating child porn is not for everyone in law enforcement, he said he and the other members of the team are dedicated to it for a simple reason: They want to protect children. For those who claim collecting child porn is largely a victimless crime, he said, they should picture a loved one in illicit images on the internet for the world to see.
“These kids have to deal with that for the rest of their lives,” he said.
The other members who won the award with him were FBI Agent Mark Denna, U.S. Postal Inspector Karen Walters and Steven Dish, an Allegheny County police officer.
Two others who worked on the Hegner case but have since moved on were Lynn Havelka, a retired Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office detective, and FBI Agent Tanya Evania, who transferred to a new FBI post.
These were the other LEAD winners:
• Brian Keefe and Michael Feeney, Allegheny County SWAT team. On May 11, they helped to rescue a 4year-old boy who had been stabbed repeatedly by his father, Syneca Ashley, who had barricaded himself in a North Versailles house following a domestic incident. Officer Feeney snatched the bleeding child from Ashley, who was still armed with the knife, and Officer Keefe rendered first aid that paramedics said likely saved the boy’s life.
• Michael Brokos, FBI, and Lt. Conor Mullen, Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office. The pair caught a trio of career criminals who had been carrying out a series of violent bank robberies across the region. Douglas Silva and Albert Clemons, both in their 60s, have pleaded guilty in federal court. Robert Stiver, also in his 60s, is awaiting trial.
• Amanda Avolia, IRSCriminal Investigation. She led the investigation of Bernard Parker, who ran Parker Financial Services in Indiana County and ripped off clients and friends in a $1.2 million Ponzi scheme.
• Robert Cessar, assistant U.S. attorney. Mr. Cessar heads a unit that targets medical professionals who are contributing to the opioid crisis as part of a new Justice Department program. He has overseen the first prosecution in the country under the initiative, the pending case against Andrzej Zielke, a doctor who ran Medical Frontiers in Richland Mall.
• Robert Slotten, U.S. Marshals Service. He performed CPR and saved the life of an elderly woman who suffered a heart attack during a naturalization ceremony at the U.S. courthouse on Sept. 15, 2017.
• Derek Bassler, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Kristen Beattie, Pennsylvania state police; and Marshall Piccinini, assistant U.S. attorney. The trio investigated and prosecuted members of the Mexico-based Knights Templar Cartel who were operating in Erie and headed by Ignacio Montes-Leon. He was extradited from Mexico and is serving 15 years in prison.
• Jessica Meyer, Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office. She won for investigations into a series of cases involving fraud, embezzlement and bad checks.
• Maurice Ferentino and Albert Maloney, U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and Matthew Irvin, Cranberry police. They investigated Deron Howell and Kahlil Shelton, convicted in May on multiple counts related to a violent marijuana robbery in Cranberry and the robbery of four professional video gamers in Lincoln-Lemington.
• Eli Peyronel, Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office. Sgt. Peyronel won for his work supervising a squad that pursues people for not paying child support, including several who were wanted for homicide and other violent crimes.
• Ryan Palso and Lucas Burdette, Pittsburgh police. The Zone 5 partners won for arresting three shooting suspects in unrelated cases in 10 days in January, including one incident in which they witnessed the shooting and ran down the suspect in a foot chase.
• Keith Heckman, U.S. Secret Service. Agent Heckman investigated William Dunbar, a Pensylvania National Guardsman who had threatened to murder Vice President Mike Pence during a visit to the 9-11 memorial in Shanksville. Dunbar is in federal prison.
• Justin Koble, U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Inspector Koble conducted a series of investigations into narcotics-trafficking operations being prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office and the state attorney general.
Three groups also won team awards: the Uniontown state police criminal section, which investigated the 2017 murder of Leah Marie Owens by Thomas Teets, who is in prison; the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Squad 62 for its investigation of the Wayne McCracken drug ring operating in Beaver County; and the group of federal agents who pieced together the case against Cynthia Mills, who in in federal prison for stealing $13 million from Matthews International in the largest embezzlement case in Western Pennsylvania history.