Teen porn images spread via phone

ALLENTOWN - Police faced a difficult if not impossible task yesterday as they tried to stop the spread of pornographic video and photos of two high school girls, images that were transmitted by cell phone to dozens of the girls' classmates and then to the wider world.

District Attorney James B. Martin said at least 40 Parkland High School students believed to have received the images would not face prosecution as long as they showed their phones to police by Tuesday to ensure the images have been erased.

But students at the school said the distribution was far more widespread.

"Most people got it and kept passing it along for fun to everyone in their phone book," said Jon Gabriel, 16, a junior who said he received and deleted the images.

A state trooper was sent to the school yesterday and will return for two more days to ensure that images were erased from the cell phones of students whose parents got letters from prosecutors. The letter explained what had happened, set a deadline for erasing the images, and asked the parents to sign consent forms.

Martin said students who do not comply could be prosecuted for possession of child pornography.

One of the girls in the pictures is shown engaging in a sex act with an unidentified boy, Martin said. The other girl took and transmitted a photo of her bare breasts, he said.

Martin said he was not certain whether the girl shown having sex "knew at the time the act was being performed that she was being photographed."

As for the other student, "she's a victim and she's not a victim," he said.

"Our thrust has been to get the kids to come forward and we've indicated we will not charge them for possessing the images," Martin told the Associated Press. "I'm not sure what we're going to do with the participants at this point."

Students interviewed at the school yesterday said the pictures made the rounds about two months ago, and that the images had been widely distributed - to Temple and Harvard Universities, to a high school in Bethlehem, even to someone in Oregon.

"The school isn't going to get everybody because it is everybody," said Samantha Smith, a 16-year-old junior who said she deleted the images when she got them.

About 3,200 students are enrolled at Parkland High School in the Allentown suburbs.