John Charles Ware, the grandson of a former U.S. congressman facing federal charges involving allegations of sex tourism for allegedly taking two teenage boys out of the country and sexually abusing them, has reportedly taken his own life.
Ware’s attorney, Chris Hoey of Paoli, said that he had been informed that his client was taken to Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia sometime Monday morning and pronounced dead. He said the cause of death was suicide, but had no other details.
Information was not immediately available from the hospital.
Ware was in custody at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, where he had been held following his arrest on the federal charges in February 2011. He had been scheduled to plead guilty to those charges in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia Monday afternoon before U.S. District Judge Mary McLaughlin.
Hoey said he had spoken with Ware last week in anticipation of the change of plea hearing. “He was very optimistic,” Hoey said. “We were hoping to resolve his case in a favorable manner. He was going to accept responsibility, and we had hoped to get him a sentence that fit the circumstances of his behavior.
“Unfortunately, this development has changed all that,” Hoey said.
Authorities with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, who were prosecuting the federal charges against Ware, were not immediately available for comment.
The indictment against Ware, 47, of East Nottingham, accused him of scheduling trips to Iceland and Italy for himself and two children, each in celebration of their 13th birthdays, and sexually assaulting them while overseas. The trips allegedly took place in July 2005 and November 2007. In addition, the indictment states he tried to take two other boys on a trip to the Bahamas for their birthdays in July, one month before his arrest on state charges of sexual assault, in order to molest them there. The trip did not take place.
According to a release from U.S. Attorney Zane David Memenger, Ware, whose father was an Oxford Borough Council member and whose family is prominently known in southern Chester County, “exhibited a pattern of grooming minors in order to ultimately have sexual contact with each of them, including encouraging the boys to swim naked in his pool, being naked in front of the boys, giving the boys massages, and attempting to normalize sexual activity between him and his victims.”
The indictment said that in the summer of 2010, Ware pressed the mother of one of the minors to allow him to take the boy and another youth to “the more secluded areas of the Bahamas,” after the boy asked Ware to take him on a trip there.
“You can trust me,” Ware allegedly told the other boy’s parents, when telling them of the plans for the trip. He is alleged to have then molested the two boys at his home in East Nottingham before leaving on the trip. ..Source.. by MICHAEL P. RELLAHAN
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