Mt. Lebanon Teacher Nabbed in Sex Sting
By Tim Puko
A Mt. Lebanon High School chemistry teacher is the latest suspect snared in the state Attorney General’s Internet sex sting.
Nicholas E. Salvo, 34, of Mt. Lebanon sent sexually explicit messages and videos to an undercover agent whom he thought was a 14- year-old girl, the prosecutor’s office announced Friday.
Salvo is charged with two counts of unlawful contact with a minor, one count of attempted unlawful contact with a minor and two counts of criminal use of a computer.
Mt. Lebanon school officials suspended Salvo, a former tennis coach, pending further investigation, they said in a statement. They found out about the arrest through Attorney General Tom Corbett’s news release, and have banned Salvo from school property.
“I like younger girls,” Salvo said in an instant message after asking the measurements of the girl, investigators reported. The recipient of the message was an undercover agent from the attorney general’s Child Predator Unit.
Salvo contacted the agent in a teen chat room and then kept up an exchange during the first two weeks of July, prosecutors said. He gave the agent access to his Web cam, showing sexually explicit video of himself, according to an affidavit filed by the agent. Investigators later matched his face from the video to his driver’s license photo.
Salvo has taught at Mt. Lebanon since August 1999 and had a brief tenure as head coach of the girls’ tennis team, district officials said. He was the district’s Classrooms for the Futures coach working to implement technology paid for by state grant money, and he helped the state Department of Education and a corporate donor to promote their grants.
Dan Palka, 18, remembered Salvo as “creepy” from a sophomore honors chemistry class and said the teacher “picked on girls in class to answer questions and stuff like that.”
“I kind of thought he was weird,” said classmate Frank Paladino. “Just the way he carried himself toward the students. He would kind of subliminally favor girls, kind of just put them at the head of the class.”
Both graduates said Salvo was good with technology, often using PowerPoint presentations in class.
There is no evidence Salvo used school computers in his communications with the undercover agent, said attorney general spokesman Nils Frederiksen. The school is cooperating with the follow-up investigation, he added.
Child Predator Unit agents, assisted by Mt. Lebanon police, arrested Salvo at his home Thursday. They seized a computer and data storage devices for analysis by computer forensics investigators, the attorney general’s office said.
Salvo was in the Allegheny County Jail in lieu of $25,000 bail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Thursday before Mt. Lebanon District Judge Blaise Larotonda.
Salvo’s was one of two arrests announced by Corbett yesterday. The other was of a factory worker from Clearfield County.
The unit has arrested 13 Internet predators statewide in less than three months, part of a “notable increase in activity” by Internet predators this summer, Corbett said in a release. Agents have arrested 157 suspected Internet predators since the creation of the Child Predator Unit in January 2005.
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