A West View structural engineer who said in online chats with fellow child porn traders that he wanted to rape an infant until the child died will spend the next eight years in a federal prison.
Cody Green, 25, entered a guilty plea Wednesday to distributing and possessing child porn and was immediately sentenced to 96 months behind bars and a decade of probation after that.
U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan also ordered Green to pay $16,700 in restitution to 10 child victims and another $15,300 in special assessments.
Many child porn defendants don’t have the money to pay such orders, but Green is an engineer who was earning $81,000 a year.
Green communicated with others in private apps, including Wickr and Tumbler, and distributed porn in the summer of 2021, prosecutors said.
The case started in 2020 with tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to the FBI regarding uploads of child porn on Tumblr, Snapchat and Discord by someone whose internet address traced to a house on Fifth Avenue in West View.
A search warrant out of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court determined the subscriber to be Cody Green’s mother. Law officers executed a search at the home in September 2021 and seized Cody Green’s phone. He was home and admitted that he had viewed child porn and created social media accounts to do it.
A search of the phone turned up a secure folder containing 19 images and 248 porn videos, including videos of sex acts with infants. Chats revealed Green had been talking to others interested in child porn on Wickr.
Those chats, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn Bloch, were “particularly egregious” because Green said he wanted to rape an infant in front of her mother until the child died.
Bloch said 13 child victims gave prosecutors victim impact statements about the effect of child porn on their lives.
Ten of those requested restitution.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
