Attorneys and prosecutors Friday agreed to drop 267 charges against a Peters Township High School senior accused of soliciting and collecting nude and pornographic images and videos of teenage boys.
Zachariah A. Meyers, 18, still faces 67 criminal counts in the alleged catfishing and sextortion scheme following a preliminary hearing Friday morning in front of District Judge Phillippe Melograne.
Meyers waived the proceeding, and he now faces trial in Washington County Common Pleas Court.
Attorney Lisle Weaver, who represents Meyers, spent much of the 20-minute hearing asking Melograne to release his client on bond. Weaver maintained the teen is not a flight risk.
Melograne declined. Meyers remained Friday in Washington County’s jail without bail.
The hearing was held in the county courthouse in Washington, instead of at Melograne’s small courtroom in McMurray, for security and space reasons.
Police said Meyers used fake social media profiles to communicate with the boys and coerced one of them, a 15-year-old, to have sex with adult men, video record the encounters and send the footage to him, according to court papers.
Meyers was arrested Feb. 20 on more than 300 charges including trafficking in minors, child pornography, sexual extortion and related offenses.
Weaver called dropping more than two-thirds of the charges against his teenage client Friday “a great compromise” with the Washington County District Attorney’s Office.
“Any day you can knock down 237 counts is a good day,” Weaver told reporters outside the courthouse.
Weaver said his deal with prosecutors also protects the alleged victims, who he said “would have been (through) a grueling, dayslong preliminary hearing.”
All 21 of Meyers’ alleged victims still are represented in the remaining counts, Washington County District Attorney Jason Walsh told TribLive after the hearing.
“Nothing was pared back — we just cleaned it up a bit,” Walsh said. “It was more of an amendment than a move to withdraw” charges.
The charges Meyers now faces include trafficking, possessing child sexual abuse material, sexual exploitation of children and other counts, court records show.
Walsh said prosecutors prepared two courtrooms Friday — one for the hearing and the other for the alleged victims and their families to watch the proceedings.
None of the alleged victims, however, attended the hearing, so the second courtroom was not used, Walsh said.
Nobody answered the door Friday at Meyers’ Windermere Court home, a stately, $750,000 brick Colonial that overlooks a picturesque orchard. At noon, a Wall Street Journal in a maroon sleeve lay untouched in the home’s driveway.
‘A lot of questions’
Peters police said they learned in December of a large-scale operation involving catfishing and sextortion upon interviewing 30 boys.
Twenty-one of them reported sending explicit images and videos to social media accounts that turned out to be fake, according to investigators.
Police believe Meyers was behind those accounts, based on information they received through search warrants about IP addresses, email addresses and account registration information, according to court papers.
Peters police Chief Joseph Glover declined to discuss the case, referring questions Friday to Walsh.
The alleged victims, ages 14 to 17, told police they believed they were communicating with a woman; the account investigators say is linked to Meyers bore the name of “Claire Muave.”
Other alleged victims were photographed or filmed while undressing in a high-school locker room after wrestling practice, authorities said. Pittsburgh attorney Amy Mathieu said she represents one of those boys.
Mathieu wants to know who in school administration was monitoring teens’ access to the internet and their cell phones, as well as what school officials knew — and what they did about it.
Peters school officials recently installed signs barring cellphone use in parts of the high school, according to Mathieu.
“That didn’t happen beforehand — so why?” she said. “There are still a lot of questions.”
A school district spokeswoman declined comment Friday.
“The safety and well-being of our students, staff, and families remain our highest priority,” the school district said last week in a prepared statement.
The school’s roster shows Meyers was a member of the high school varsity volleyball team.
Don’t trust until you verify
Walsh, the DA, said sextortion charges filed by his office are not uncommon, though he didn’t have statistics.
“It’s more common than you think,” Walsh said. “It’s maybe not with this many victims to one individual. But we see it all too frequently.”
National data amplify this growing trend.
Nearly 24,000 sextortion reports were made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the first half of 2025 alone, the organization’s data show. That’s nearly double the number reported during the same period a year earlier.
FBI agents in Pittsburgh typically handle about 1,000 to 2,000 sextortion reports each month, Christopher M. Giordano, a top agent in the Pittsburgh office told TribLive Thursday. Not every tip leads to criminal charges or a lengthy investigation.
Increased access to the internet, combined with children’s pervasive use of cellphones and other electronic devices, exacerbates the problem, according to the agency.
“This is not something new to the FBI,” Giordano said. “This has been something that’s been going on for years. But it is increasing.”
Sextortion victims vary in age and gender, according to Giordano, but children and the elderly are often the ones targeted.
“They prey on our most vulnerable populations,” Giordano said. “One of the things we always say is ‘Don’t trust anyone you meet on the internet until you verify who they are in person.’”
