A prize-winning author and professor who has taught writing at Allegheny College in Meadville for two decades could be headed to federal prison after the FBI arrested him this week on child pornography charges.
Kirk Nesset, 57, who splits his time between homes in Meadville and Prescott, Ariz., appeared before a U.S. magistrate in Erie on Wednesday and was released on a $10,000 bond.
The FBI said in an affidavit that an agent in Arizona last month traced child pornography computer files shared in a peer-to-peer network to Mr. Nesset’s computer.
Agents and state troopers searched his house in Meadville on Wednesday and seized an external drive they said contained 550,000 images and movie files. Some of the videos described by the FBI involve girls as young as 8.
Mr. Nesset waived his Miranda rights, according to the FBI, and admitted that he downloaded and stored the images. He also indicated he had a preference for girls ages 10 to 13, the FBI said.
If he’s convicted, he faces a mandatory minimum of five years behind bars.
The case began Aug. 14 when an Arizona FBI agent was conducting an undercover investigation on a BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network. He tracked the IP address to Mr. Nesset’s Arizona home and his billing address to his house in Meadville, according to the affidavit, leading to the search warrant application.
Mr. Nesset notified Allegheny College on Wednesday that he would be resigning.
In an email to the campus Thursday, the college president, James Mullen, said “there is no adequate way to describe the shock and outrage these allegations have elicited from every member of our community, myself included. The sexual exploitation of young children through pornography is a heinous thing and a serious crime.”
He said the school is working to determine the best way to reassign Mr. Nesset’s classes and that all of his students would be notified.
Mr. Nesset is a well-known figure in Meadville, where he plays guitar in several bands, and at the college, where he has been teaching since 1995.
The author of six books, he won the 2007 Drue Heinz Literature Prize given by the University of Pittsburgh Press for his work “Paradise Road,” a collection of short stories.
He had won other prizes over the years and appeared often at readings in Pittsburgh and across the region.
According to his website and other sources, he grew up in a logging town in northern California and earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of California Santa Cruz and his master’s and doctorate at UC Santa Barbara.
He worked in a variety of jobs outside of academia, including disc jockey, grocery clerk and dance instructor, and between 1991 and 1995 was an assistant professor at Whittier College in California. He then took a full-time position at Allegheny College and was granted a full professorship in 2009.
First Published: October 2, 2014, 1:40 p.m.
Updated: October 3, 2014, 11:56 a.m.
