Print edition: 
As part of a wider investigation into reports that teenage girls in Wichita and Arkansas City have been solicited for sex over the Internet, a 25-year-old man has been charged in Sedgwick County.
Thomas L. Pennycuff, 25, of Arkansas City, has been charged with one count of electronic solicitation of someone he thought was under 16, Sedgwick County District Court records say.
Pennycuff was charged following an investigation that began after a Wichita police detective learned two 13-year-old girls had been contacted on MySpace by someone who identified himself as Tom and said he was 17, an affidavit filed in the case says.
It was not clear whether Pennycuff was in jail Monday night; a man who answered a telephone number listed for Pennycuff declined to comment.
Meanwhile, investigators in Arkansas City are trying to determine whether there could be other possible victims, Arkansas City Police Chief Sean Wallace said Monday. An investigation found that Pennycuff chatted online with about 80 teenage girls who live in Cowley County, Wallace said in a news release.
Investigators interviewed all 80 girls, and those interviews could lead to additional charges, Wallace said.
"The Arkansas City Police Department is appealing to parents of young teenage girls who frequent social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook," Wallace said.
"Please ask your daughters if they have had any contact online or otherwise with Thomas Pennycuff. If they have, please contact the Arkansas City Police Department Investigations Division at 620-441-4435."
Pennycuff has been certified as an emergency medical technician since July but is not actively working for an ambulance service, according to the Kansas Board of Emergency Medical Services.
The Sedgwick County charge against Pennycuff came after a police detective interviewed two 13-year-old girls at a Wichita middle school, the affidavit said. The girls said that someone who called himself Tom and said he was 17 contacted them using his MySpace account but that, based on pictures on his MySpace page, he appeared to be older than 17.
One of the girls told the detective that during a MySpace chat, Tom said he wanted to meet with her and smoke marijuana. When she refused, "he would get mad at her and ask her why she wouldn't talk with him," the document said. The girl said Tom told her he had had sex with eight girls.
One of the girls reported her concerns about Tom to a school principal and a school resource officer.
When the detective checked Tom's MySpace account, she found several pictures, including a close-up of a man's face and a picture of the same man in an EMT class.
The detective used an undercover MySpace account to send a message to Tom's account on Oct. 29. Tom sent messages back to the undercover account and asked for pictures of the person to be sent to his Yahoo e-mail address. Tom was sent a photo of an employee with the Wichita-Sedgwick County Exploited and Missing Child Unit, taken when she was 14 or 15. When Tom asked how old she was, she said 15, the affidavit said.
The detective traced a phone number to Thomas L. Pennycuff and saw that his driver's license photo appeared to show the same person in the MySpace photos sent by Tom, the affidavit said.
On Oct. 30, the detective saw text messages sent by Tom asking to meet the person on the undercover account in Wichita, and asking "to take (the person) to a movie, dinner and then drive (the person) to his place in Arkansas City, Kansas where they could cuddle and kiss and asked (the person) what she wore to bed," the affidavit said.
According to the document, the online communication continued, and Tom spoke of sex acts and arranged to meet the other person at an apartment in the 2000 block of South Broadway in Wichita.
On Nov. 2, a police detective followed Pennycuff out of Arkansas City and let Sedgwick County investigators know Pennycuff was leaving town, according to the affidavit and Wallace.
In Wichita, police saw a man get out of a vehicle and go up to the address where the meeting was to occur.
The man police arrested was Pennycuff, the affidavit said.
