James Ford - Repeat Sex Offender - Lured kids by offering them jobs

James Ford worked at a couple of Waffle House restaurants in both Louisville and southern Indiana.

Victims tell us that shortly after leaving the company is when he began posing as a manager offering high-paying jobs.

Since 1993, he's been arrested more than two dozen times in Louisville.

Back in 2003, police say he sexually abused three young girls, who were 9-years-old, 10-years-old and 11-years-old at the time.

For that, Ford was sent to prison, where he was charged with escape.

Also, he repeatedly was arrested for violating the sex offender registry.

Ford eventually obtained a job as a waiter at a New Albany Waffle House.

Within a month of leaving Ford began walking throughout New Albany posing as the manager and offering young men jobs at the restaurant.

One man says his younger brother was targeted.

“He's talking about getting him a job, but he wanted to go smoke weed with him and drinking with him,” he says.

A Louisville mother made a similar accusation last year. In the arrest warrant, the officer says Ford gave the 17-year-old boy a glass of wine and a beer and then inappropriately touched the boy.

Ford was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to the charge, but served only three months in a Kentucky facility before being transferred to Indiana, where he served less than two months in the Floyd County jail.

Then he got out and allegedly began soliciting boys again.

According to the mother of Ford's children, he listed an apartment complex on Mitchell Road as his address.

Even though he's a convicted sex offender, you can see it's a stone's throw from a daycare center and right across the street is an elementary school with hundreds of children.

Last week, police say Ford began staying with his cousin in a home directly behind Liberty High School, where investigators say Ford met two boys Monday, promising them jobs.

Ford was eventually coaxed to a supposed meeting with another child, where he was nabbed by police.

Ford pleaded not guilty to the charge during his first appearance Thursday.

He's being held at metro corrections under a $5,000 bond.

Ford is also wanted in Floyd County Indiana for failure to comply with the sex offender registry.

"25% of all sex offenders re-offend within 15 years"
.........Sarah Tofte