(File Photo of a Gavel)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Butler County, PA) A former guard for a private security company at Seneca Valley School District faced a woman that he assaulted when she was a 16-year-old student and her parents on Thursday when he was sentenced in Butler County Common Pleas Court.

Twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Alan Cowan of Brackenridge was sentenced to serve 24 to 48 months in jail and he was paroled to serve the minimum balance on electronic monitoring followed by 36 months of probation after he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of aggravated indecent assault.

Jackson Township police filed that charge and other charges against Cowan after an assault on a trail behind the school campus in August of 2021.

He pleaded no contest to a felony count of disseminating photos depicting a child sex act filed by Cranberry Township police in a second case.

Police filed 44 felony charges against Cowan for the sharing of nude and sexually explicit photos with a female student who was between 16 and 17 years old.

That student sent him the photos for about eight months before the start of the 2021 school year.

Cowan was sentenced in that case to serve 12 to 60 months in jail and he was paroled to serve the minimum balance on electronic monitoring followed by 36 months of probation.

The sentences in the two cases are concurrent.