Sex offender trespassed at hotel pools to take photos of girls and had child porn, police say

On May 25, a group of girls, all under the age of 12, were visiting York County from New York for a softball tournament, staying at the Clarion Hotel on Sheraton Drive in Fairview Township.

Some of them were swimming in the hotel's indoor pool when one girl noticed something odd. An older man was taking photos of the girls as they frolicked in the pool. She told one of the team's chaperones, who, according to a criminal complaint filed later by Fairview Township Police, tried to confront the man. The man took off.

The next day, at about the same time, close to 9 p.m., the police were summoned to the hotel once again for a report of a man taking photos of the young girls. This time, according to police, the adults with the softball team detained him and held him until the police arrived.

The police charged the man, Jeffrey Hamilton Carr, 60, of Orangeburg, S.C., with trespassing. That touched off an investigation that led police to a trove of child pornography on Carr's computer.

Car was charged with 15 counts of possession of child pornography, according to court records.

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Police also discovered that he was a registered sex offender in South Carolina, having been charged in 1994 with peeping, voyeurism and aggravated voyeurism. He also has a conviction on a charge of public indecency in Ohio dating to 1990, according to court records. 

Carr told arresting officer, Chad Bowman, that he had traveled to central Pennsylvania "to seek relaxation," according to the criminal complaint filed July 8.

He initially denied taking photos of the girls, Bowman wrote in the complaint, but then, during the course of the conversation told the officer that he "may have taken pictures of the children" with his phone.

Carr told Bowman that he had a room in a hotel in suburban Harrisburg and that he had visited several hotels in the area taking more than 100 photos of young girls "because 'the female subjects looked good' to him," according to the complaint. 

He told the officer he deleted the photos when his phone's memory filled up, Bowman wrote.

Carr gave Bowman permission to search his phone and while looking at it, the officer saw "multiple pictures" of young girls in bathing suits, the complaint states.

During the interview, Bowman wrote, Carr mentioned a computer in his hotel room. Armed with a search warrant, police seized the computer. 

Carr was charged with criminal trespass in that instance and released on $25,000 bail. Those charges were withdrawn on July 10, after the child pornography charges were filed, according to court records. 

On June 25, police obtained a search warrant for the contents of the computer and sent it off to the state Attorney General's forensic lab for analysis. The analysis "revealed several videos of 'apparent child pornography'" and "a significant amount of child erotica," Bowman wrote.

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The lab provided Bowman with a thumb drive containing 15 videos of child pornography, representing "a small sampling of the total amount of apparent child pornography" stored in the computer, according to the complaint.

Carr is free in $25,000 bail. He faces formal arraignment on August 16.

His attorney was not immediately available for comment on the charges.