A former police trainee in upstate New York is now facing multiple federal charges, including kidnapping, cyberstalking and child pornography crimes, prosecutors announced Friday.
Casey Medina, 33, of Rochester, is accused of sending multiple pornographic text messages to a 31-year-old female over several weeks beginning in May 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York said in a news release.
The text messages, which had been sent by numbers unknown to the victim, included explicit images of sexual acts with her face superimposed on them.
The woman reported the incident to the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office at the time, telling investigators that some of the messages also contained threats of rape, kidnapping, sexual abuse and murder.
In August 2024, the victim told investigators she had received the messages for about four weeks, starting sometime in May. After a short break, they “continued sporadically through June and July 2024.”
Around that time, authorities received a tip from an individual who said he had communicated with a person on social media who was seeking someone to help him “harass” a victim.
That person, later identified as Medina, gave the individual the victim’s home and job addresses, phone number, and photos, prosecutors said.
Screenshots of conversations between the individual and Medinda included discussion of abducting, drugging and raping the victim, according to the attorney’s office. An undercover officer who began chatting with Medina online also reported similar conversations with the suspect.
Medina was arrested on multiple state charges by the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office on Aug. 24 — just days after he began training to become a law enforcement officer with the Avon Police Department, according to Syracuse.com
When investigators executed a search warrant on his cellphone, they recovered the conversations about the abduction, drugging and raping of the victim, as well as images and videos of child pornography he had shared online.
He’s now charged with kidnapping, cyberstalking, aiding and abetting, and distribution, receipt and possession of child pornography, U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross said Friday.
If convicted, Medina can be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
