North County Times wire services

SAN DIEGO -- A judge declared a mistrial Thursday in the case against a 65-year-old man accused of molesting three boys in the late 1990s.

Judge Cynthia Bashant took the action after it was revealed that a juror told fellow panelists during deliberations that he had been the victim of an attempted molestation.

A retrial was set for Aug. 31.

On Wednesday, the jury reached verdicts on 26 of 31 counts against Bimson, saying it was deadlocked on the remaining five charges.

Bimson faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of 30 counts of oral copulation of a child and one count of committing a lewd act on a child.

He was found last Aug. 18 semiconscious inside a rental car parked on the side of a Las Vegas freeway, with a hose running from the vehicle's exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment, authorities said.

A 25-year-old man testified last week that Bimson - who took him in from a shelter when he was 13 - molested him every night for months until he told the defendant he wanted it to stop.

The witness, identified only as Sam, testified that his older brother first met the defendant in 1992 and went to live with him after meeting him through a Big Brother-Big Sister program. He said his family had been living in a shelter because his mother was having drug and emotional problems.