Union County sting leads to arrest of registered sex offender
An activist sting led to charges against Steven Richard Tarr II, a New Columbia man accused of using an unregistered X account to seek child pornography and meet a child.
Union County state police charged Steven Richard Tarr II, 41, of Park Drive in New Columbia, after an activist-led sting exposed messages he sent to someone he believed was an 11-year-old girl. Tarr was arraigned July 8 and held in Union County Jail in lieu of $75,000 bail as authorities put the case on a July 21 preliminary hearing before District Judge Jeffrey Mensch in Mifflinburg.
The charge reaches beyond one arrest for local residents because police say Tarr was already in Pennsylvania’s sex-offender system and still used a social media account that was not registered with authorities. State police said Tarr admitted using an X account to receive videos and pictures of child pornography, and the criminal complaint charges him with a felony count of failing to provide accurate registration information.
Tarr is listed as a 15-year Tier 1 Megan’s Law offender in Pennsylvania, with one alias identified as Ashlee Phillips. State police said his Pennsylvania Megan’s Law registration began on Dec. 10. The public registry is meant to protect the community, but the state police website also warns that the information may be outdated or inaccurate, a caveat that takes on added weight in a case built around online identities and messaging platforms.
Court and state records also tie Tarr to a prior New York conviction. He was convicted Aug. 4, 2021, of one felony count of possessing a sexual performance by a child, and earlier had been accused of sexually abusing a 4-year-old girl in Williamson, New York, after meeting the child’s mother online in 2020. Those allegations and convictions place the Union County arrest in a broader pattern of online contact, concealed identities and child-exploitation offenses that law enforcement has been tracking for years.
The federal registry system is built around the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 and earlier laws, including Megan’s Law and the Wetterling Act, and the FBI says its Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website aggregates information from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories and more than 150 Indian tribes. In Union County, the practical question now is whether registration requirements and online-identifier rules were enforced tightly enough to keep Tarr from operating under an unregistered account before the sting brought police in.
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