Teen charged in sextortion scheme has counts reduced

Zachariah A. Meyers, 18, still faces 67 counts alleging he solicited and collected intimate pictures and video from minors.

By JUSTIN VELLUCCI
TribLive

Attorneys and prosecutors Friday agreed to drop 267 charges against a Peters Township High School senior accused of soliciting and collecting nude and pornographic images and videos of teenage boys.

Zachariah A. Meyers, 18, still faces 67 criminal counts in the alleged catfishing and sextortion scheme following a preliminary hearing Friday morning in front of District Judge Phillippe Melograne.

Meyers waived a hearing on those counts.

The hearing was held in the county courthouse in Washington, instead of at Melograne’s small courtroom, in McMurray, for security and space reasons.

Meyers’ case heads to Washington County Common Pleas court next month.

Police said Meyers used fake social media profiles to communicate with the boys and coerced one of them, a 15-year-old, to have sex with adult men, video record the encounters and send the footage to him, according to court papers.

Meyers was arrested Feb. 20 on more than 300 charges including trafficking in minors, child pornography, sexual extortion and related offenses.

Attorney Lisle Weaver, who represents Meyers, called dropping more than twothirds of the criminal charges against his teenage client Friday “a great compromise” with the Washington County District Attorney’s Office.

“Any day you can knock down 237 counts is a good day,” Weaver told reporters Friday morning outside the courthouse.

Weaver said his deal with prosecutors also protects the alleged victims, who he said “would have been (through) a grueling, dayslong preliminary hearing.”

All 21 of Meyers’ alleged victims still are represented in the remaining counts, Washington County District Attorney Jason Walsh told TribLive after the hearing.

“Nothing was pared back — we just cleaned it up a bit,” Walsh said. “It was more of an amendment than a move to withdraw” charges.

The charges Meyers now faces include trafficking, possessing child sexual abuse material, sexual exploitation of children and other counts, court records show.

Walsh said prosecutors prepared two courtrooms Friday — one for the preliminary hearing and the other for the alleged victims and their families to watch the proceedings.

None of the alleged victims, however, attended the hearing, so the second courtroom was not used, Walsh said.

Meyers remains in Washington County’s jail without bail.

Peters police said they learned in December of a large-scale operation involving catfishing and sextortion upon interviewing 30 boys.

Twenty-one of them reported sending explicit images and videos to social media accounts that turned out to be fake, according to investigators.

Police believe Meyers was behind those accounts, based on information they received through search warrants about IP addresses, email addresses and account registration information, according to court papers.

The alleged victims, ages 14 to 17, told police similar stories about communicating with an account by the name of “Claire Muave,” which investigators say was linked to Meyers.