MIAMI — A 60-year-old man who was convicted of crimes related to sexually abusing boys in Germany, England, and the U.S. was at the Federal Detention Center in Miami on Friday, records show.
Justin Ward, a British military veteran who is a registered sex offender in the U.K, was awaiting sentencing on April 7 with U.S. District Judge Jose E. Martinez, records show.
Ward, who faces up to 30 years in a federal prison, was convicted in Miami of traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor, according to federal prosecutors.
“Crimes against children are the most vile offenses imaginable. This defendant crossed international borders to continue abusing a child he had already victimized overseas,” U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones said in a statement released on Friday.
Public court records of Ward’s appeal to stop his extradition to the U.S. showed that Ward had lived in Germany from 1999 to 2002 and was employed at a U.S. consulate there.
Ward befriended the victims’ parents, U.S. citizens who worked for the U.S. Department of State in Germany, and followed them to South Florida in 2004 after they moved, according to federal prosecutors.
Detectives and prosecutors in the U.K. and the U.S. set up this timeline: Ward moved from South Florida to Manchester in 2006. In 2011, police officers in Cheshire started to investigate Ward for sexually abusing a boy there and found images of child sex abuse on his computers.
In 2012, three brothers in South Florida reported that they had been Ward’s victims. In Cheshire, Ward told police officers that he had sexually abused two of the brothers for years in Germany, and continued the abuse in South Florida. In 2013, one of the former victims, aged 24, died.
In 2014, in Chester, Ward pleaded guilty to 23 charges: four of indecent assaults on boys in Germany, who were not the boys who lived in South Florida; six relating to the commission or incitement of sexual activity with boys in Cheshire; one of attempting to pervert the course of justice between the date of his 2011 arrest and the date of his 2012 arrest, by destroying a hard drive which contained indecent imagery; and 12 of making and possessing indecent images of children.
In 2018, a grand jury in South Florida indicted Ward for the 2004 crime after FBI Miami special agents investigated him.
In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department requested Ward’s extradition, and records showed investigators alleged Ward introduced a man to a boy he was sexually abusing in Florida, and that man also sexually abused him.
In 2022, CheshireLive and The Mirror reported that after Ward’s sentence was cut to about eight years on appeal, Cheshire residents were worried he was living near the Eleanor Palmer Primary School and Rainbow Nursery in Kentish Town, North London.
The Mirror reported, “One of the alleged victims committed suicide years later. Members of his family blame Ward for his death.”
According to Reding Quiñones, it took “years of legal challenges” to extradite Ward to the U.S. on July 14.
“Let this be clear: distance, time, and geography will not shield child predators,” Reding Quiñones said in a statement. “The Southern District of Florida will relentlessly pursue those who exploit children, no matter where they hide and no matter how long it takes.”
FBI Miami Special Agent in Charge Brett D. Skiles announced Ward’s conviction after Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Koontz prosecuted the case.
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