A man who was sentenced last year for attempting to meet minors for sex in Long Beach was found hanging from a tree in Griffith Park on Saturday, authorities said.
According to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, Levi Moscowitz was found hanging from a tree near the 2600 block of Commonwealth Canyon Avenue by a passerby, said coroner’s Lt. Fred Corral.
Paramedics pronounced Moscowitz dead at 8:20PM, and an autopsy is pending. The death was ruled an apparent suicide.
Moscowitz pleaded no contest in late October to charges resulting from a sting operation run by a Los Angeles Police Department detective who posed as a father with a 13-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter.
The detective then answered Moscowitz’s ad on Craigslist, which said he was “seeking to participate in a sexual encounter with a family interested in incest.”
Moscowitz was arrested for the crime in February when he went to Long Beach for the expected sexual encounter, only to be encountered by police.
Moscowitz pled no contest in October to one felony count of meeting a minor for lewd purposes, and was sentenced to one day in jail, a year of counseling and five years of probation.
No further information is available. We will update this story as we learn more.
City News Service contributed to this report.