Pittsburgh defense attorney accused of arranging sexual meet-up with who he thought were teen girls

PITTSBURGH — A Pittsburgh defense attorney was arrested over the weekend after police said he was having sexual online conversations with who he believed were teenage girls.

Some of the details of the conversations were so explicit, we cannot report the specifics.

Luvara was parked in a McDonald’s parking lot in Punxsutawney this weekend, where he thought he was going to meet up with two teenage girls — 13 and 15 years old.

Instead, Punxsutawney police arrested him. During the process of getting Luvara into custody, he fought back, and a gun fell out of the car.

“That kind of concerns me. He was there to meet a child, and he had a handgun in his sweatpants pocket,” Brian Knepp with 814PredHunters said.

Knepp is the founder of 814PredHunters, a group that uses decoys to target online predators.

He said his decoys had been chatting with Luvara since October and had planned to meet up with the attorney several times before this weekend.

“This was actually the fourth meet-up that Paul had set up,” Knepp explained. “And things always came up with the other ones. He had to go and see clients two or three of the times.”

During the conversations, Knepp said Luvara admitted to having a previous sexual relationship with a 14-year-old, sent a nude photo of himself and often talked about being an attorney.

“He told the child it was a kind of a fantasy of his to be in sexual relations while speaking on the phone with another attorney or a judge,” Knepp said.

He was released on a $50,000 surety bond. When we called his cell phone today, it went straight to voicemail.

“An attorney is supposed to be out there to help people and here he is preying on our children. It’s just crazy to me,” Knepp said.

We reached out to both the Allegheny and the Jefferson County DA’s offices to find out of they are investigating the attorney’s claim that he had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old.

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