Tim Boyce, the former director of Emergency Services for Delaware County, was convicted Friday of assaulting and harassing two of his female employees.
Boyce, 63, was charged with indecent assault, simple assault, and harassment in 2024, after his former executive assistant told police he grabbed her buttocks and forcibly tried to kiss her.
Weeks later, a second set of charges was filed when another woman Boyce hired and worked with for years, said he showed her pictures of his penis, lifted up her skirt to look at her genitals and once muted a Zoom call she was part of to ask her graphic questions about sexual positions she preferred.
After about nine hours of deliberation, jurors convicted Boyce of all but one count, the simple assault charge.
Boyce was taken into custody after the verdict was read and the judge set his bail at 10% of $50,000. He will be sentenced in December.
His attorney, Andrew Edelberg, said afterward that he was disappointed with the verdict, but respected the jury‘s decision.
County officials fired Boyce shortly before the criminal charges were filed, after the first woman filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In his closing arguments, Edelberg told jurors that the case against his client was “botched, bungled, fumbled, messed up” by investigators who failed to find evidence corroborating the women’s allegations.
He accused prosecutors of attempting to play on jurors’ emotions with the testimony of the two women, who he said offered unreliable testimony.
“The Commonwealth wants so badly to convict Mr. Boyce, they’re desperately clinging to this story,” he said.
The women’s true intention was money, he said, referring to potential settlements from lawsuits they both have filed against the county.
But Deputy Attorney General Madelyn Abry, in her closing arguments, warned jurors not to be distracted by what she described as “filibustering by the defense.”
“Mr. Boyce is upset, he’s sad, he was devastated because he was caught, because his actions have finally caught up with him,” she said. “And they did so because of these two brave women.”
Abry told the jurors Boyce chose his victims intentionally: Both women were single mothers at the time, desperate for better-paying jobs that would provide health benefits for their families.
Boyce took the stand during the trial and vigorously denied the women’s allegations.
“I’m not making excuses because I have nothing to excuse myself for,” he said, calling the second woman’s assertions “absolutely a lie.”
He became emotional under questioning by Edelberg, saying that he checked into a rehab facility in Arizona for treatment of suicidal ideation, and later sought treatment from a second facility in Pennsylvania.
Edelberg, in his closing arguments, described Boyce as a hero who helped recover bodies from Ground Zero during the September 11 attacks, and who once saved three children from a burning building as an Upper Darby firefighter.
He noted that the second woman remained friendly with Boyce after the first alleged assault, which was in 2018. And she later invited him to her wedding, he said.
“Why would you include a man who tells you these horrible, dirty jokes … and not tell anybody?” he asked jurors. “It’s the same theme, ladies and gentlemen: Excuse after excuse.”
During her testimony, the woman said she waited to report the first assault, and endured the subsequent ones, because of Boyce’s authority.
“I’m nobody,” she said. “He’s the director in charge of all 911.”
The first woman testified that she sent Boyce a text message after the assault, telling him he had degraded her and made her feel like a piece of meat.
Boyce responded to that text, saying he was “sorry and not making excuses,” according to a copy of that text exchange displayed in court.
When pressed by Abry about that text, Boyce, while denying the assault, said he apologized because he believed the woman was drunk while she was texting him and attempting to “set him up.”
Abry noted that Boyce had a history of lying, and of flouting county employment guidelines: For six years, she said, he engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with another employee, one he admitted he hid from his wife and children.
The assaults on the two victims, Abry said, took place after that relationship ended in 2023.