Muschal

By Fallan Patterson

A Kissimmee man was busted for child pornography Tuesday after taking his personal computer into a local Best Buy store to be serviced.

George Michael Muschal, 67, 1360 Mill Creek Circle in Kissimmee, was arrested and charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after images of naked girls as young as 3 performing explicit sexual acts were found on his Gateway Notebook computer by Best Buy staff.

Muschal brought his computer into the store's Geek Squad computer repair department in June because he was unable to connect to the Internet due to viruses on his computer, according to the charging affidavit.

When the Geek Squad employee opened the laptop to begin working, he noticed a wallpaper image of scantily-clad girl approximately 7-9 years old lying on a bed, which caused the employee to become suspicious, the affidavit stated.

Muschal told the employee when he dropped off the computer June 19 for service the girl on the wallpaper image was of his granddaughter.

Due to protocol, the store's general manager searched the computer for additional images before calling authorities. She found several disturbing images of young girls and contacted the Osceola County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies obtained a search warrant to forensically examine Muschal's computer, which included nearly 900 full and thumbnail images of pornography including legal adult pornography, child erotica and child pornography. As many as 83 images had child pornography leanings, affidavit stated.

Deputies also recovered an email sent from Muschal to someone else with the message “george and his nude little girl photos that he loves.”

Deputies stated in the affidavit the evidence shows a “propensity of the age group of images Mr. Muschal used his computer to seek out on the Internet” for “transmitting, downloading and viewing through his computer.

“The user of this computer would not only view them (the images) but took an active part in downloading them onto the computer and then saving them in a folder which was created by the user,” the affidavit stated.

Muschal was interviewed by deputies June 20 about the images on his computer, to which he allegedly admitted to conducting Internet searches for “young teens, teen porn movies and teens having sex.” He also told deputies he conducted these types of searches “about every other day” and allegedly admitted to being the individual who searched for, viewed and saved the images on the computer.

Deputies only arrested Muschal Tuesday despite being made aware of the situation in June because of the mass amount of information, Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Twis Lizasuain said.

“It takes awhile to make sure those images are kids. There were a lot of images,” she said.

Muschal was taken to the Osceola County Jail and held on $25,000 bond.