UGA instructor suspended after allegations of soliciting sex with a minor

The videos were posted by an Instagram account under the handle streetsweeeperztv. The account poses as a 14-year-old boy in an attempt to catch pedophiles in Athens.

UGA sent a campuswide email Wednesday explaining the situation. “Shortly before noon Tuesday, the UGA Police Department was made aware that social media influencers had confronted an instructor in class with accusations of inappropriate predatory texting with a minor and posted a video of the incident,” the school wrote. “The UGA PD has been in communication with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and is working with the social media influencers to collect all relevant evidence.”

UGA has not named the instructor. The AJC reached out to the instructor Tuesday evening for comment ant has not received a response.

Angelus Pereira, who runs the Instagram account, sent screenshots to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They show a conversation between the account and the person said to be the instructor.

In it, the man says he is 30 years old and teaches at UGA. The account wrote: “Im turning 15 next month” and then “But im grown” before sending an image of what appears to be a nude male. Pereira told the AJC the image was from a porn website.

The account asks if the instructor will perform a sexual act. The man sends explicit messages about his sexual desires.

According to Pereira, the entire interaction took place over roughly 24 hours. It began on Friday afternoon after the instructor matched with the decoy account on Grindr, an LGBTQ dating app. It moved from the app to text messaging, where the account revealed that they were underage.

“He pretty much said, ‘Look, I’ll be your friend. I’ll correspond with you, but I can’t meet up with you.’ Then he went back into being flirtatious again,” Pereira recalled.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

They soon connected on Snapchat, where Pereira said the man sent explicit photos of himself. But by Saturday afternoon, the man blocked the account and discontinued the conversation.

Pereira and a group of men went to confront the instructor Tuesday on UGA’s campus. He went into the instructor’s classroom and showed him text logs and photos from the online conversations. They then exited the classroom together, and Pereira identified himself and said he was not a police officer.

Videos show an encounter with the man outside and also inside the classroom, where accusers tell the class that their instructor is a “pedophile.” The rest of the class was canceled, according to UGA.

“The Franklin College of Arts and Sciences will arrange for another instructor to teach the class for the rest of the semester,” the school said Wednesday.

Pereira said he was meeting with UGA PD Wednesday to share information about the instructor. Campus police referred questions about the matter to the university’s communications department.

Pereira told the AJC in an interview last year he and four friends created the account after one of his five children was sexually assaulted. Pereira said he was worried other predators were slipping through the cracks in his Athens community and that local police couldn’t keep up.

Pereira estimates that streetsweeeperztv has exposed more than 20 men since it was created late last year, and that some have been arrested.

“If someone tells you that they’re underage, cease communication, block the account, report the page,” Pereira said. “We’ll make a million pages. We love it when you report the page, we love it when you say no.”

UGA asked that anyone with information about the allegations reach out to police or the CyberTipline, a national reporting mechanism for cases of child sexual exploitation.