FirstAlerts
Crime & Courts

Turtle Creek Man Sentenced to 20 Years for Producing Child Sexual Abuse Material

Robert Bookshar, 49, was sentenced in federal court for two counts of production and attempted production of child sexual abuse material.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 25, 2026, 6:52 p.m. ET
Developing · not yet checked for updates

This case is not concluded. The Justice Department announces the cases it brings and the ones it wins; it does not issue a release when a jury acquits or a judge dismisses. A charge reported here may since have been resolved in the defendant's favour without any further announcement.

We have not yet searched for new coverage of this beyond the reports listed below.

A Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, man was on August 24, 2026, to 20 years in prison for producing child sexual abuse material, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The sentence was announced on August 25, 2026. Robert Bookshar, 49, was also ordered to serve 10 years of supervised release and pay $15,000 in restitution to his victims. Bookshar pleaded guilty in March 2026 to two counts of production and attempted production of material depicting the sexual exploitation of children. Court information stated that from September 2021 through June 2023, Bookshar communicated with an online organization offering child sexual abuse material for sale. On August 23, 2022, and May 12, 2022, he purchased live video calls with two different female minors, during which he requested that each minor "get naked" and engage in sexual conduct. He secretly recorded the calls and saved them to a folder labeled under each girl's name on an external hard drive. U.S. District Judge William S. Stickman IV imposed the sentence. Assistant U.S. Attorney Heidi M. Grogan prosecuted the case. The investigation was conducted by the FBI's Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Task Force, including the Allegheny County Police Department, and the Tampa and Colorado Springs police departments. The case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a Department of Justice initiative.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 125 Aug 2026, 22:52current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.