Uniontown child molester Zachary Bosh, a former Army medic who recorded himself sexually assaulting a young girl and sent the video to an undercover FBI agent in real time during an online pedophile chat, says he deserves leniency when he gets sentenced next week in U.S. District Court for producing porn.
He and one of his lawyers, Lyle Dresbold, say the victim as well as various family members think the federal government has been “unjustly harsh” in pursuing his case “so aggressively.”
A medic who served in Iraq and Kuwait, Bosh said he was prescribed Concerta for post-traumatic stress disorder and attention deficit symptoms.
In sentencing papers, Dresbold said the drug made his client’s PTSD worse and “caused a change in sexual behavior which contributed to his conduct in this case.”
He also said Bosh, 39, has already served two years on a related state court case for the molestation and should get no more than 15 years in federal prison for making the video.
But prosecutors want U.S. District Judge Mark Hornak to give him at least 17½ years and up to 262 months, or more than 21 years, saying his crime was “abhorrent” and he’s an obvious threat to children.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Silinski said that a sentence in the high end of the range ensures that the victim “and other children in his life are adults by the time he is released from his sentence of incarceration and denies him the opportunity to victimize other children, including his own, and those in the community.”
The Bosh case has a tangled history. He twice backed out of plea deals with the U.S. attorney even after Judge Hornak warned him he might end up in prison for 30 years.
His wife also excoriated the investigating FBI agent as “scum” for pursuing her husband and leveled similar diatribes against a veteran court reporter covering the case, saying they had both ruined her family’s lives.
Bosh finally pleaded guilty in July to producing a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
The case began in April 2019 when he entered a chat group on Kik called “#parentstoys” to talk to “like-minded child predators,” Salinski said.
During private messaging with one of them, Bosh sent seven videos of himself molesting a young girl on a bed. He also said he had assaulted her previously, wanted to rape her “so bad” and wanted the two of them to rape her at the same time.
The person he was talking to was an undercover agent.
Because the molestation was happening real time, the FBI got an emergency disclosure from Kik to identify the user and called in state troopers. They went to the house and arrested Bosh. A search turned up the same bed sheets seen in the video.
The case proceeded on two fronts, with the district attorney’s office pursuing the molestation case and federal prosecutors handling the video production.
Bosh pleaded no contest in the state case and served his sentence.
Judge Hornak will sentence him on Tuesday.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
