A former professor at Bucks County Community College pleaded guilty last week to one felony count of possession of child pornography.
Vincent Varra, 32, of New Britain Borough, pleaded guilty on Aug. 1 to a sole count of possession of child pornography, court records show. Sentencing was deferred to allow for officials to perform a pre-sentencing investigation.
Varra was a part-time professor of Language and Literature at the county community college. Officials there said Varra was terminated on Dec. 31, 2021, after the school became aware of his arrest.
“We found out about the charges in late December and made an immediate move to terminate once we were made aware,” said Megan Smith, spokesperson for the school.
School officials declined to provide an official statement.
Investigators said they received three Internet Crimes Against Children tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on Oct. 7, concerning video files that had been uploaded or stored to a Dropbox account and a Yahoo email account. The videos depicted young boys and girls — mostly around the ages of 5 and 6 — being sexually abused and raped by adults, according to the criminal complaint.
The accounts were eventually traced back to Varra, who was identified as the account holder, police said.
On Oct. 27, detectives made contact with Varra at his apartment — located along the 400 block of East Butler Avenue — and spoke with him about the investigation, the report states. Varra told police that he had recently closed his Yahoo account, and he also received notice from Norton Anti-Virus that his email address had been spotted on the dark web, according to the complaint.
When asked how certain he was that investigators would not find child pornography on his electronic devices, Varra allegedly replied “90%,” the report states. Police then recovered three iPhones, a laptop computer and a Playstation 4, according to the criminal complaint.
A forensic examination of the laptop computer revealed “numerous files that contained child pornography,” police said, including another video of an adult male sexually abusing a 5-year-old boy.
Charges were filed against Varra on Dec. 8, 2021. He is currently free on $100,000 unsecured bail as he awaits sentencing.
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