A 26-year-old Hanford man was arrested at his home on Thursday and charged with possessing child sexual abuse material and related offenses, following a McFarland police investigation that began after a 12-year-old girl was asked to send inappropriate photos to an unknown person on Snapchat. Investigators identified Javier Castorena-Garcia as the suspect in that case, and a second man already in custody elsewhere faces an active McFarland warrant for similar conduct.
The McFarland Police Department said it first received reports that a 12-year-old girl had been asked to send inappropriate images to an unknown person over Snapchat, according to 23ABC News Bakersfield. Police said an adult male had engaged in inappropriate communications with a juvenile female through the app, and detectives traced the activity to Castorena-Garcia during their investigation.
What Police Say the Evidence Shows
Investigators said the evidence they gathered went well beyond a single exchange. Police reported that Castorena-Garcia misrepresented his age to juvenile females, and the station's report lays out a pattern that detectives say included more than just one inappropriate conversation. According to the account, evidence indicated Castorena-Garcia “misrepresented his age to juvenile females, engaged in sexually inappropriate communications, solicited sexually explicit images, transmitted sexually explicit videos, and possessed material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
Castorena-Garcia was arrested Thursday at his home in Hanford and charged with possession of child sexual abuse material and related charges, per the same account. The arrest capped an investigation that had been building around the Snapchat reports McFarland police first received.
Second Suspect Already Behind Bars
Detectives in the case also identified a second suspect, 21-year-old Sergio Cortes, as part of the same investigation. Detectives discovered that Cortes is currently in custody at the San Bernardino County Jail on separate, similar charges, the report notes, and he also has an active warrant issued by the McFarland Police Department. He is expected to be extradited to face those charges, though the outcome of that process has not been confirmed.
A Sergio Cortes matching that age was also named in a separate Fontana case reported by Hoodline last month. In that case, Fontana police said they opened an investigation in August after receiving reports that a child younger than 14 had been sexually exploited by an adult met on social media, and arrested a 21-year-old Los Angeles resident named Sergio Cortes on Oct. 15. That report described Cortes using Instagram, Snapchat and X to request sexual images and videos from minors and attempting to meet them in person, with detectives later linking his social media accounts and phone number to additional potential victims.
A Surge in Online Enticement Reports
The McFarland case lands amid a dramatic rise in reports of children being targeted online. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline received 1.4 million reports concerning online enticement in 2025, according to missingkids.org — a 158% increase from the year before. The organization also logged an average of 137 financial sextortion reports per day in 2025, up 37% from the prior year's daily average.
Part of that increase stems from the federal REPORT Act, which now requires electronic service providers to report online enticement and child sex trafficking the same way they report child sexual abuse material, per missingkids.org. Nationally, CyberTipline reports involving online enticement jumped from 292,951 in the first half of 2024 to 518,720 in the first half of 2025, Hoodline previously reported, while child sex trafficking reports climbed from 5,976 to 62,891 over the same comparison period.
No court filings, case numbers, or plea information were available for either suspect as of Thursday's report.
