Ryan Loskarn, the Senate Aide Accused of Possessing Child Porn, Is Dead
Ryan Loskarn — the former chief of staff to Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander who was arrested for possession of child pornography last month — was found dead Thursday afternoon at his parents' house of an apparent suicide.
The Tennessean reports that the local sheriff released a statement on the death Friday morning.
At approximately 12 p.m. yesterday, Carroll County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to a private residence in the 6900 block of Kenmar Lane for a report of an unconscious male, believed to be deceased. Family members reported finding 35-year old Jesse Ryan Loskarn unresponsive in his basement where he’d been residing with family since this past December.
"The preliminary investigation," it continues, "indicates that Loskarn may have taken his own life." After Loskarn was arrested on December 11, he was ordered to live under house arrest with his parents in Sykesville, Maryland, awaiting trial.
According to the criminal complaint, D.C. police allegedly caught Loskarn tossing a hard drive containing child porn out a window after breaking down his door to gain entry at his arrest. Police tracked Loskarn down after he allegedly tried to download a video of a 6-year-old girl being raped.
According to the charging document, Loskarn used a peer-to-peer file-sharing application called Gnutella to download the video mentioned above, which according to investigators was a 28-minute video involving a young girl and an older man. Other files are mentioned in the complaint, including a video involving a 10-year-old girl and "hundreds of videos depicting underage boys engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
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Those files were on the hard drive that Loskarn allegedly dropped out a rear window of his apartment. When authorities arrived at his house on Wednesday, they knocked and, receiving no reply, used a battering ram to gain entry. When they entered, one of the officers saw Loskarn — who "appeared to be in a nervous state looking right and left" — leaning out of a window. Later, they recovered a Toshiba hard drive including the files above from the rear roof underneath the window. "There was snow on the ledge and roof where the drive was found due to the snow storm the day before," the complaint notes. "This device was free of snow."
Politico cites three anonymous sources in reporting Loskarn's death. As more information becomes available, this story will be updated.
This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/01/report-senate-aide-accused-possessing-child-porn-dead/357362/
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