UF official charged in sex case

A Gainesville man was arrested Friday after he engaged in a sexually explicit online chat with an undercover officer, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum's office said.

Seth Jerchower, 45, who is the director of the Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida, was arrested and charged with soliciting sex with a minor Friday.

In October, Jerchower reportedly engaged in a chat with an undercover officer whom Jerchower thought was a mother of two young children. During the conversation with the "mother," Jerchower reportedly explained to her "in graphic detail what he wanted to do to her children," according to a news release from McCollum's office.

Jerchower also reportedly asked the mother if he could have sex with her children, who he was told were 11 and 9 years old.

"It is just as dangerous for a child predator to solicit a parent for sex with a child as it is to solicit a child directly, and just as illegal," McCollum said in the news release.

Kyle Cavanaugh, senior vice president for administration at UF, said late Friday that his office was still trying to definitively confirm that the Jerchower arrested is the same man who works for Smathers Libraries at UF.

"We, unfortunately, believe it is the same person, but we are still establishing that," Cavanaugh said. "We have a process that, any time something like this occurs, we place the person on paid administrative leave status pending an internal review."

Cavanaugh said Jerchower is a relatively new employee at UF, having been hired in August. Jerchower has the title of associate university librarian, and Cavanaugh said the university had no knowledge of any inappropriate behavior by Jerchower when he was hired.

"Nothing surfaced that gave us any indication there would be anything like this," Cavanaugh said. "That would have been something we would have looked at very closely. And we have no indication that any of this activity occurred at work."

This is the second recent case of a UF official being arrested in connection with sexually explicit conversations online involving children.

John Patrick Shannon, 44, a former UF law school official, was sentenced in November to two years house arrest followed by eight years probation on two counts of child abuse.

Prosecutors filed abuse charges against Shannon based on e-mails and Internet chats where he offered another person advice about giving a child an extra dose of medication in order to take advantage of the youngster.

Cavanaugh at UF said his office takes every precaution to avoid hiring anyone with an undesirable background, but he said not all indiscretions appear on background checks.

"Unless someone had been actually not only arrested but convicted of a previous crime, it's very difficult to actually ascertain that kind of information from normal reference checking," he said. "It's possible to have someone who participated in something where there was never an arrest and never a conviction."

Jerchower was booked into the Alachua County jail Friday, and the Attorney General's Office said additional charges could follow.

Jerchower was arrested through the efforts of the attorney general's Child Predator CyberCrimes Unit, along with assistance from the Gainesville Police Department, the FBI and the Alachua County Sheriff's Office.