'Obsessed' Patient Beat Bucks Co. Chiropractor To Death: DA

BENSALEM, PA — A Bensalem man beat a local chiropractor to death after becoming obsessed with him and blaming him for treatment he believed made pain in his jaw worse, according to prosecutors.

Joseph Robert O'Boyle, 22, of Bensalem, has been charged with criminal homicide, burglary, criminal trespass and possession of an instrument of crime in the Nov. 2 slaying of James Sowa. Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub announced the charges on Friday.

According to Weintraub, O'Boyle was treated for jaw pain by Sowa at his home office on Hulmeville Road on Sept. 14.

"After that visit, which occurred late last year, O'Boyle obsessively complained to his family that his jaw pain worsened after receiving the chiropractic treatment," Weintraub said. "That fateful interaction caused ... O'Boyle to obsess on Dr. Sowa."

Prosecutors say O'Boyle got inside Sowa's office, hit him in the back of the head with a blunt object, then — perhaps intentionally — struck him repeatedly in the face and jaw.

"(It was) almost as in that Old Testament chapter and verse — instead of an eye for an eye, a jaw for a jaw," Weintraub said. "It's not fitting. It's not proper. But that seems to be the motivation here."

O'Boyle already was being held at Bucks County Correctional Facility after he was arrested for assaulting a Bensalem Police officer who was investigating Sowa's death. Weintraub said he is being held without bail and that prosecutors planned to ask that status be continued during a hearing scheduled for later Friday.

Detectives were serving a search warrant at O'Boyle's home on Nov. 10 when they saw a suitcase packed with clothes on the floor in his bedroom. They say he lunged at a detective and punched him in the head several times.

He was charged with two counts of aggravated assault and one count each of recklessly endangering another person, resisting arrest and simple assault in that case.

Weintraub said the murder charges are based on a grand jury presentment after "amazing" investigative work by Bucks County detectives and other local police. The 40-page grand jury presentment includes testimony from numerous witnesses and evidence.

According to his website, Sowa, 64, had been in practice in Bensalem since 1980. He grew up in Penndel and graduated from Neshaminy High School in 1974, according to the site.

Sowa attended college at the New York Institute of Technology and graduated from the New York Chiropractic College in 1979.