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Bergen Prosecutor: Man Makes More Than 130 Bogus Calls Claiming He Sexually Assaulted Kids

A security guard who claimed to be sexually assaulting children while on the phone with 911 dispatchers and crisis hotline counselors in New Jersey and New York was charged with causing a false public alarm, authorities said.

John LaForgia

John LaForgia

Photo Credit: BERGEN COUNTY PROSECUTOR

John LaForgia, 36, of Staten Island made more than 130 bogus calls to law enforcement agencies and crisis hotlines in various jurisdictions, including Hackensack, Oakland, Ramsey, and Ridgewood, over the course of only two weeks, Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella said Monday.

The former Lodi resident, who has no children of his own, apparently spent no time with youngsters, authorities said.

He’d done it before, they said.

Messages about perverted plans for abusing children were popping up in emails and texts to strangers, so investigators quickly swooped in and arrested LaForgia when he lived at Westervelt Place in March 2010.

LaForgia was “using the Internet and his cellular telephone to transmit e-mails, instant messages and text messages about an impending sexual and physical assault of a child,” prosecutors said at the time. “Those messages were transmitted to random people that he did not know and to others that he met while in Internet chat rooms.”

This time, detectives caught LaForgia “using technology to anonymize his caller ID” to place repeated calls to local law enforcement agencies and crisis hotlines, Musella said.

LaForgia told dispatchers and others during the calls that he was “currently sexually assaulting a child or was about to while on the phone with them,” the prosecutor said.

Detectives from Musella’s Cyber Crimes Unit who were notified following a series of calls on Feb. 15 learned of others made beginning Feb. 1, he said.

LaForgia surrended to the investigators on Friday and was released pending a first appearance in Central Judicial Processing Court in Hackensack on a causing false public alarm charge.  

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