Detectives say sergeant solicited teen for sex acts on work-issued laptop
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – A Broward Sheriff’s Office sergeant has been arrested on child pornography charges.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel announced the arrest of Sgt. Kreg Costa during a Thursday afternoon news conference.
Costa was arrested Thursday on more than two dozen child porn and illicit sexual conduct charges.
Israel said an investigation began in April after staff at the BSO’s Weston district, where Costa works as a road patrol supervisor, noticed that he was staying in his office during his night shift with the lights turned off and his uniform belt and gun removed.
BSO detectives requested a computer usage report of Costa’s work-issued laptop from January to March. It revealed that Costa was accessing hardcore pornography, incest-related and bondage websites while he was at work, BSO spokeswoman Veda Coleman-Wright said.
Detectives began monitoring Costa’s internet activity and determined that he was engaging in sexually explicit exchanges with a 16-year-old girl via email, Twitter and video, Coleman-Wright said. She said Costa told the California teenager to record herself while she engaged in sex acts.
The girl told investigators that she first started communicating with Costa, whom she knew by his Twitter handle @CallMeSir34, when she was 15.
Costa was arrested Thursday morning after he arrived at work for a training class, Coleman-Wright said. He was initially suspended with pay effective April 25, but he has since been suspended without pay.
“These allegations, if true, are reprehensible and actually disgusting,” Israel said.
According to an arrest warrant, Costa used his training and experience working with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force “to seek and lure in a child who was a 4.0 grade point average high school student from a church-going family, and manipulate and groom her for his sexual gratification.”
Costa faces a total of 29 charges, including use of a child in sexual performance and soliciting a child for unlawful sexual conduct using computer services or devices. He is being held without bond at the main county jail.
“Every citizen accused is innocent until proven guilty, even a law enforcement officer,” Costa’s attorney, Daniel Aaronson, said in a statement to Local 10 News. “We will diligently investigate and defend these serious charges and, based on what we know, believe he will be exonerated.”
This is the same LE that just took his own life.
Correct – it is the same guy
No they just get a slap on the wrist and lose there job , if that.
Hmm, thanks for highlighting that part about using his training for the ICAC task force to his own advantage. But the cops doing this kind of stuff, they aren’t crooked at all are they? Noooooo. He ruined the lives of who knows how many innocent unsuspecting men through luring and entrapment, and now his own tactics backfired against him completely. I don’t believe in karma, but the Bible does say you reap what you sow!
Where is the public registry and residency restrictions for LEOs? I believe the community would be much safer knowing where these LEOs live and safer yet if we force them out of their homes! (Wait… that doesn’t work, does it? Does it?)