He and another, HIV-positive man met the boy in an Internet chat room, the DA said. A high-ranking Yonkers official and an HIV-positive former Pepsico employee were indicted yesterday in separate sexual assaults on a 15-year-old Westchester boy they met online, officials said.
The boy – whose identity is being kept confidential – is the 10th Westchester boy this year reported to have been sexually assaulted by someone he met in cyberspace.
“Our children are at risk,” Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro said, announcing the indictment of the two men – one of whom directs Yonkers’ Office of Downtown and Waterfront Development.
“We’ve taught them that you don’t talk to strangers,” Pirro said. “Well, someone continues to be a stranger even if they’re talking to them in their own bedroom on their own computer.”
The Yonkers official, James Surdoval, 42, pleaded innocent to sodomy and endangering the welfare of a child. Surdoval was chief-of-staff to two past Yonkers mayors.
He faces up to four years prison. He’s been allowed to keep his current job pending the indictment’s outcome.
The second suspect, Patrick Murphy, 45, the former Pepsico employee, who lives in Port Chester, faces an additional charge of reckless endangerment.
That’s because he allegedly sodomized the boy during 1998 and 1999 without warning him he was HIV-positive, and without using protection.
Murphy, who also pleaded not guilty, faces up to seven years prison.
Pirro declined to say if the boy has tested positive for the virus which causes AIDS.
She said both men met the boy in an Internet chat room.
Investigators don’t know if Surdoval and Murphy knew each other, but a single, Internet service provider helped catch them, Pirro said.
Investigators stumbled on the two men as part of an investigation of Robert DeRosario, 36, a Yonkers man who’s been charged with sexually abusing nine boys he met in Internet chat rooms.
DeRosario is also the prime suspect in the November death of a 12-year-old Yonkers boy, Orlandito Rosario Maldonado, whose decomposed body was found in a shallow grave.
Pirro condemned the unprecedented access to children that the Internet gives perverts, and warned kids not give out their names online or agree to meet with anyone they’ve met in chat rooms.