Man pleads guilty to raping girl

A Lehighton man is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty Monday to repeatedly raping a grade schooler over seven years in a case that led to similar charges against a Carbon County police chief.

Gregory Wagner, 30, of Lehighton, pleaded guilty in federal court in Harrisburg to raping and sexually exploiting the girl from 2005, when she was 4, to 2012, when she was 11, the state attorney general’s office said.

Meanwhile, the state attorney general’s office on Tuesday reported no update in the case of Getz’s friend, former Weissport police Chief Brent Getz, 29, of Lehighton, who is facing similar charges involving the girl.

Weissport officials said they were unaware Getz was being investigated when they promoted him to police chief in February 2019. After his arrest that March, Borough Council voted unanimously the following month to fire him.

The girl first reported the rapes to a substitute teacher in May 2012, according to court records. A forensic interviewer and child sex assault examiner found symptoms “consistent with sexual abuse.”

When the girl told her mother and a victim’s center counselor that both Wagner and Getz raped her, the counselor told her to “stick to one perpetrator” because “two would make people disbelieve her,” attorney general’s office agent Sean McGlinn testified at an April 2019 preliminary hearing.

McGlinn said at the hearing he was looking into the counselor’s statement and that the victim’s center has since closed. He said he didn’t know why Wagner wasn’t charged in 2012 or 2015, when a criminal complaint was prepared but later dismissed on a technicality.

The girl told a Franklin Township police officer in 2018 that Getz took part in the rapes. The Carbon County district attorney’s office passed the case to the attorney general because Getz was a Weissport police officer at the time.

After Wagner and Getz were arrested, Wagner admitted to sexually abusing the girl, authorities said.

Getz has denied all allegations.