Glassport man sentenced for child porn
A Glassport man who possessed nude photos of a teenage Kentucky girl and hundreds of other child porn images is headed to federal prison for more than seven years.
U.S. District Judge Robert Colville imposed that term Wednesday on Rory Shelton, 59, who had pleaded guilty in the summer to possession of material depicting the sexual exploitation of a minor.
The case began in May 2019 when a 16-year-old girl was discovered missing from her foster home in Paducah, Ky.
Police discovered that she’d been talking with Shelton on Instagram. She said he’d told her he would marry and protect her. Kentucky police contacted Glassport police, who went to his one-room apartment.
He initially said he had no knowledge of the girl, and police didn’t see her anywhere. But a later review of security surveillance footage showed he was lying and that she had been there with him.
Officers confronted him again the next day and found the girl naked in his apartment.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Karl said Shelton had driven to Paducah, picked up the girl and brought her to Glassport.
After the police found her, the FBI and Allegheny County police obtained a search warrant for Shelton’s two cellphones and found nude images of her as well as 600 other child porn images.
Shelton was prosecuted in state court on charges related to taking the girl while federal prosecutors adopted the child porn case and brought anindictment in 2020.
Mr. Karl said Shelton clearly has a sexual interest in children and needs to be locked up for a long time.
Unlike many other federal child porn defendants, he said, Shelton acted on his impulses by traveling to Kentucky to pick up a minor and exploit her.
“The defendant is not a theoretical threat to the community,” Mr. Karl said. “He is a real threat.”
Shelton’s lawyer, Neil Rothschild, argued for leniency, saying his client did not seek out the child porn found on his phones but rather had it because people in chat rooms sent it to him unsolicited.
He also said there’s no evidence that Shelton sought out relationships with underage girls except for the one from Kentucky.
In the related state case, Shelton pleaded guilty in 2019 in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court to interfering with custody of children, concealment of a child and obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 36 to 72 months.