Joshua Michael Pethtel

A Saxonburg man serving a state prison sentence in a 2018 child pornography case was sentenced to more prison time and found to be a sexually violent predator for assaulting two young girls.

Joshua Michael Pethtel, 36, was sentenced Friday to six to 12 months in prison, followed by three years of probation and ordered to report to state police for the rest of his life after being found to be a sexually violent predator under Megan’s Law. He was sentenced after pleading guilty to two felony charges of indecent assault of a person under 13 years old.

State police filed the charges in September last year following an incident January 2016 in Jefferson Township, where he was accused of abusing two young girls.

According to an affidavit, police began investigating after receiving multiple ChildLine reports in June last year, then talked with the two girls within a week of the reports.

Pethtel was transported from the State Correctional Institution in Mercer County to the Butler County Prison and was sentenced Friday by Common Pleas Judge Kelley Streib.

At SCI Mercer, he is serving a one- to three-year sentence he was given in September 2021 after pleading guilty to a felony charge of child pornography that state police filed following a January 2018 incident in Jefferson Township.

In that case, Pethtel was initially charged with having 58 images of child pornography on his cellphone between 2018 and 2020. He told police he watched child pornography on the internet, and that he believed it was an addiction. A ChildLine report of suspected child abuse initiated the investigation in March 2020.

The sentence he was given Friday runs concurrently with the 2021 sentence.