Ty Grabowski said his personal crusade against child pornography has helped law enforcement crack down on the dark side of the Internet. State police maintain that Grabowski's Internet sleuthing -- even if it is well intended -- is illegal. Grabowski, 37, of Carnegie, is scheduled to go on trial in Allegheny County court Feb. 22 on 34 counts of possessing kiddie porn. The maximum sentence for each count is seven years in prison. Grabowski said he downloaded the images to his computer hard drive as part of one-man campaign he began five years ago to track down child predators and pedophiles on the Internet. Grabowski said he was motivated by concern for the welfare of children. He said he has reported hundreds of cases to the police. State law allows an individual to possess child pornography only for "bona fide educational, scientific, governmental or judicial" purposes. Grabowski, a single former wireless phone technician and former diver with Air Search Rescue in Harmar, is not a law enforcement officer, and therefore, state police say, is prohibited from possessing any sexual images of children. State police Trooper John LaRoche said he found almost three dozen deleted sexual images on the hard drive of Grabowski's computer during a search three years ago. "I know how many people I've helped," Grabowski said. "What I don't know is why they're coming after me when there are so many real predators out there exploiting innocent children." LaRoche concedes that Grabowski's work led to the arrest in 2001 of one man suspected of trying to lure children on Internet chat rooms into sexual encounters. The criminal complaint LaRoche filed against Grabowski also indicates that Grabowski has given more than 50 tips concerning child porn to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va. Grabowski, now unemployed, free on $3,000 bond and staying with his sister in Canada, was working on his own without a formal connection to any law enforcement agency. LaRoche said in an interview this week that he warned Grabowski that his sleuthing overstepped the law. "I can appreciate tips from the public who come across child porn on the Net and report it," LaRoche said this week. "But leave the policing of the Internet up to me. We don't need vigilantes." The Allegheny County District Attorney's Office declined to comment because the trial is pending, as did Grabowski's public defender, P. Christopher Hoffman. Staca Urie, a supervisor in the exploited child unit at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said her group warns people against possessing child porn for any reason. "The law is clear. It is illegal to possess child porn. Intent does not come into play," she said. "Although the intentions are good, it's a bad idea." Urie said her experience shows that police will not prosecute people who accidentally come across child porn, then report it to authorities. "If there's a pattern of this and the computer would show that, it's a different story," she said. LaRoche said allowing exceptions beyond "bona fide educational, scientific, governmental or judicial" purposes would set a bad precedent. It could open up defense strategies for pedophiles who might try to cover their tracks by filing reports to law enforcement. Grabowski said he has had contact with police agencies while serving in the Coast Guard and then as a diver with Air Search Rescue in Harmar, a nonprofit that helps law enforcement agencies conduct search and rescue operations. He has never been a sworn law enforcement officer. His interest in fighting child porn began when he received "spam" on his computer that directed him to a child porn site. "He's a real go-getter, take-action kind of guy, so that really motivated him to turn this into a hobby," said Grabowski's friend and former diving partner, Dave Yelle, 40, of Monroeville. A computer technician by trade who used to work for Verizon Wireless, Grabowski designed a program that searches for child porn sites on the Web, and soon began posing as a 12-year-old girl in Internet chat rooms, watching for predators to solicit him. He called his project "Operation Exploited Child." "The cyberworld is growing at a rate so fast, it outruns law enforcement in every direction," Grabowski said. According to LaRoche's criminal complaint, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said Grabowski made 54 reports to it about suspected child porn on the Internet, 12 of which were verified. The center's Urie declined to comment on Grabowski's case specifically. Grabowski said someone from the center had warned him that what he was doing could be a violation of agency policy. "But I was never told to stop what I was doing." Grabowski said he also worked with federal investigators in Pittsburgh and local police in Ohio and Seattle, some of whom made arrests based on his information. None of the investigators Grabowski identified as working with him returned calls for comment. Grabowski said he received an e-mail in 2001 from state police Trooper Nick Chimienti in Harrisburg that encouraged him to continue a personal investigation into one predator. Chimienti declined to comment. Grabowski said he doesn't have a copy of the e-mail because it is on the computer hard drive seized by LaRoche. Grabowski spoke to LaRoche for the first time in June 2001 to report he had been propositioned by a man while posing as 12-year-old girl in a chat room. LaRoche said he used that information to set up a sting and arrest a Fulton County man whom police said drove to Castle Shannon to meet the correspondent he thought was a girl. Allegheny County Judge Lester G. Nauhaus threw out the case in May, ruling that the man did not commit a crime by driving to the area. LaRoche said Grabowski continued to call with more tips. "It appeared he was going out of his way to find this stuff, and that made me question his intentions," LaRoche said. Five months after LaRoche arrested the Fulton County man, the trooper returned to Grabowski's home with a search warrant and took his computer and files. An examination of Grabowski's computer in March 2002 found 34 images of child porn that had been archived and then deleted, according to the criminal complaint, Grabowski said he is sure the images were on his computer only because of his work to hunt down the predators. "I'm not a pedophile. I was running this operation to help law enforcement," he said. "I'm not guilty of anything, and I'd do it all over again." Grabowski said he hopes some of the investigators he helped will testify on his behalf, although he has run out of money to fly anybody in for trial. "Even if I'm found guilty, police should be going after the Web sites that these images came from, and I'm afraid they won't do that," he said. "The government just doesn't take child pornography as serious as it should."

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