And he would have gotten away with it, too — if it weren’t for those meddling kids!
Two crafty Bronx high- school students thought the computer technician at their school was “creepy,” so they took matters into their own hands, creating a Facebook page for a fictitious 16-year-old hottie, whom the school staffer later asked out on dates, city investigators found.
The teens’ super-sleuthing got 38-year-old Cinema School computer technician Kevin Eckstein canned from his gig at the Bronx school this past summer.
The 16-year-old male-and-female detective duo told city investigators they created “Sarah Archer,” a fake profile, “to engage Eckstein in conversation because they suspected that he behaved inappropriately with young girls,” according to a report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation.
The single father of two — whose Facebook profile was “King Lovenest” — took the bait, the report said.
Eckstein told the fake teen she was cute, invited her to visit him at the school and asked her out on dinner dates over several months last summer — though it was clear to him that she was 16, city investigators said.
He also asked her what she did for fun and revealed his interest in photography immediately after she claimed to be a model, according to the investigation.
The probe was sparked in April after a school staffer overheard the teens talking about their sting and reported it.
Approached outside his Brooklyn home, Eckstein told The Post he had been the target of a prank and insisted that he had stopped chatting with Archer as soon as he learned her age.
“When I discovered in the conversation after two days that she was 16, I ended contact with her. I blocked her,” he said.
“Two kids out of the whole school who didn’t like me attempted to talk to me on Facebook and it created a buzz within the school and it led to an investigation,” he added. “It ended and I left the school.”
But investigators said Eckstein offered no response when they confronted him with Facebook exchanges showing that the fictitious girl had revealed early on that she was 16.
When they pointed out that her online profile said she was a Lehman HS student, he responded, “I don’t remember seeing that on her profile,” the report says.
“It started out as a little joke. People used to say things about him and I wanted to see if it was true,” said one of the pranksters. “I never intended for him to get fired.”
However, investigators also spoke to a real teenage girl who had dropped out of The Cinema School who claimed that Eckstein had similarly used Facebook to ask her out to meals several times last year.
He called the eventual dropout “beautiful” in separate Facebook messages to her and Archer, the report says.
Eckstein, who was fired on Aug. 12, denied those claims to investigators.