Cop accused of underage sex

HARRISBURG - A small-town police officer was charged yesterday with having indecent contact with underage girls and pressuring girls to have sex with him in exchange for lenient treatment for themselves or relatives.

Robert Pavlovich Jr., 39, of Camp Hill, faces charges that include sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, bribery and 14 counts of corruption of minors. He has been suspended with pay from the Marysville Police Department since March, according to the mayor. The allegations date back to 2001, the year after Pavlovich was hired.

Police said that one of his victims is mildly mentally retarded and that Pavlovich had contact with girls through the MySpace. com social-networking site using a police department computer.

He allegedly told one girl that if she told anyone about what he had done, his wife would divorce him and he would never be allowed to see his daughter.

A grand jury found that Pavlovich asked 14 underage girls to leave their homes secretly and to meet with him, solicitations it said were overtly or implicitly sexual or involved illegal behavior such as underage drinking.

The grand-jury presentment accuses Pavlovich of touching girls sexually, including one child who Pavlovich knew had psychological problems and who previously was molested by a neighbor.

"I read some of [the presentment], and I'm just sick to my stomach," Marysville Mayor Deb Troutman said yesterday. She said that legal issues prohibited the firing of Pavlovich outright but that the borough plans an emergency meeting at which she intends to push to make his suspension unpaid.

Authorities said Pavlovich told a 15-year-old girl that she would not get in trouble for retail theft if she sneaked out of her house to meet with him late at night. The girl told the grand jury that Pavlovich had given her money to buy crack, and she described incidents in which he allegedly overlooked obvious criminal violations involving children.

Another girl, 16, said she had been a passenger in a vehicle driven by her 21-year-old brother that had been pulled over by Pavlovich. He allegedly later told her that he would not charge her with underage drinking or her brother with drunken driving if she engaged in a sex act with him. She did not, she said, but neither she nor her brother was charged.

On several occasions, parents and other adults confronted Pavlovich or the then-chief, Jacob J. Stoss Jr., about alleged inappropriate contacts by Pavlovich with girls.

Stoss resigned in March on the day State Police executed a search warrant on the department. Troutman, the mayor, said the department has only a single officer on active duty.

The Lancaster New Era reported yesterday that Pavlovich had been charged in 1995 with indecently assaulting a teen girl while working as a Manheim Township police officer. He was acquitted but subsequently fired, the paper said.

He was being held in the Perry County Prison yesterday in lieu of $500,000 bail. *