All-Boys Catholic School Run By Monks Acknowledges Decades Of Sexual Abuse
The Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey is facing sexual abuse allegations from 30 people.
By Carol Kuruvilla, HuffPost US
Allegations against the Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey have sparked at least 15 lawsuits.
Thirteen Benedictine monks and one lay teacher associated with a New Jersey religious order have been accused of sexually abusing people in cases that go back decades, leaders of the group admitted in a letter.
The heads of Morristown’s St. Mary’s Abbey and the Delbarton School, which is run by the abbey’s monks, said that 30 people have come forward with accusations of assaults from 1968 to 1999.
It was an attempt at transparency by the abbey’s Abbot Richard Cronin and the school’s headmaster, Michael Tidd, who is also a member of the order. The letter, posted to the school’s website, is the first acknowledgment of the broad scope of the problem by the Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey at its all-boys Catholic prep school, according to NJ Advance Media.
The accusations have sparked at least 15 lawsuits since 2012 ― eight of which have been settled, with the remainder pending.
“Our hearts are full of compassion for the victims of sexual abuse, and we applaud the courage of those who have had the strength to step forward and speak about their experiences,” Cronin and Tidd wrote in the letter, dated July 20.
They said their letter was prompted by several local news stories about the settlements. The two leaders said payments for the court settlements have come from insurance coverage and not from donations to the school or abbey. The amounts of the settlements have not been released.
The Delbarton School is an independent Catholic school for boys in seventh through 12th grades. It was founded in 1939 by monks of St. Mary’s Abbey.
The sexual abuse allegations come from former Delbarton students, former students of the St. Elizabeth of Hungary School in Linden, and a parishioner at a local Catholic church. A Delbarton employee’s twin sons who lived on the grounds as children have also lodged accusations against the school.
The alleged victims started coming forward in the late 1980s. Cronin and Tidd claim the abbey took disciplinary measures against accused monks and notified Morris County prosecutors. Only one case resulted in criminal charges.
The Rev. Timothy Brennan, a former teacher at Delbarton, was convicted in 1987 of abusing a teenage student. He was sentenced to one year of probation, NorthJersey.com reports, and now lives in a treatment center for priests in Missouri. According to The Associated Press, he has admitted to abusing 50 boys.
He abused 50 boys and never spent a day in prison. Good grief!
Cronin and Tidd tried to assure alumni, current students and their parents that Delbarton has implemented new standards to ensure children’s safety. The school now does fingerprint and background checks on monastery candidates, gives the monks annual abuse prevention training and undergoes regular audits by Praesidium, a company that helps institutions set up protocols to prevent child abuse.
Starting with the upcoming school year, students at Delbarton will be required to take a child safety webinar that will help the boys recognize and defend against abusive behavior.
“Above all, we want you to understand that protecting the well-being of the students of Delbarton and all those to whom we minister is our highest and most important priority,” Cronin and Tidd wrote.
They claimed that “no restrictions have been placed on the victims’ ability to discuss their experiences.” But Bill Wolfe, whose accusations resulted in Brennan’s conviction, said the school locked him into a nondisclosure agreement for decades.
Wolfe wasn’t allowed to publicly discuss his abuse until 2014, when he won a court battle to free himself from some of the confidentiality agreement’s terms. He’s still not allowed to speak about the amount of a 1988 settlement he received.
As a result, he told NJ Advance Media, he has little faith in the school’s latest attempt at transparency.
“They fought me every step of the way. They attacked my family. They attacked my parents and they attacked me. They sued my attorney for representing me,” Wolfe said. “So the idea they’ve been open and honest and compassionate, that’s not been my experience. I’ve lived a lifetime of anxiety and far from being allowed to speak about it, I’m still not allowed to speak about some issues.”
NY State man gets 2 years in child sex case
Amanda Purcell Columbia-Greene Media
HUDSON — A Clermont man sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison Thursday for attempted sexual abuse of a child under the age of 13 said he will try to make amends for what he did.
Keith Pierson, 23, made a brief statement in Columbia County Court before he was sentenced Thursday morning.
Pierson told the court he regretted the situation caused by his actions. “I have strived to be truthful and honest in this situation as I have throughout my whole life,” Pierson said. “I wholly and freely accept the consequences… for my previous actions. I will continue to strive to be honest and truthful in addressing this situation and my life. I can only hope others can see my sincerity.”
Pierson originally faced charges (7th story on link) of first-degree sexual abuse, a class D felony; and endangering the welfare of a child, a class A misdemeanor, police said.
Pierson was convicted of a lesser charge April 5 of attempted sexual abuse, a class E felony; after waiving a possible grand jury indictment and agreeing to plead guilty.
Columbia County Court Judge Jonathan Nichols issued an order of protection on behalf of the victim until July 26, 2026 — the maximum period of time allowed by law, he said.
“Mr. Pierson does consent to the maximum order of protection,” public defender Dominic J. Cornelius said. Pierson was ordered to pay more than $1,000 in court and sex offender registration fees.
The Columbia County District Attorney’s office has a policy to permit plea deals when defendants waive their right to grand jury proceedings, Columbia County District Attorney Paul Czajka said. As part of the plea deal, the district attorney’s office agreed not to recommend a length for Pierson’s sentence, Nichols said.
Nichols committed to the two-and-a-half-year in prison sentence when Pierson was convicted April 5.
State police arrested Pierson on Sept. 23 after receiving a report of the abuse from a 911 call. He has been held in Columbia County Jail on $5,000 bail since his arrest.
Assistant District Attorney Ryan Carty represented the prosecution in court Thursday.
Trial continues for woman in sex trafficking
of child in Florida
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Thursday was day two of the trial for Celeste Chambers.
She's the Tallahassee woman accused of prostituting a child for 13 years, all in exchange for drugs.
Authorities say the crime spanned both Leon and Gadsden Counties and involved the child being subjected to sexual abuse from February 2003 to March 2016.
Court documents indicate the child was only 3 years old when the abuse began.
Chambers was arrested in June 2017.
And authorities say Chambers did not act alone. They believe, Kevin Wyatt, was her accomplice. Sheriff's deputies found him hiding in a houseboat near Apalachicola.
He remains in jail on seven felony, human trafficking-related charges.
Oregon child sex abuse suspects on the lam for 18 years found in Mississippi
Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore. — A couple who eluded arrest on multiple charges of child rape and sodomy in Oregon for nearly 20 years were finally discovered in Mississippi when the man died and his common-law wife used one of his aliases to make funeral arrangements, a law enforcement official said Thursday.
An undertaker in Mississippi entered the alias used by Leon Henry Shaw into his computer last week and realized Shaw was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, said Eve Costello, the Klamath County, Oregon, district attorney.
She told The Associated Press that FBI agents who have been trying to track down Shaw and his partner, Victoria Michelle Cravitz, since the pair fled Oregon in 2000 moved in and arrested Cravitz. She had been living under the name Jennifer Larsen.
Cravitz made an initial court appearance in Jackson, Mississippi, on Thursday on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution and is expected to be returned to Oregon.
The arrest marks the end of a sordid story that began in 1999 when people who said they had been abused by Shaw and Cravitz as children went to authorities and said they were worried that three other children still living with the couple would also be molested, Costello said. Investigators determined the abuse began in 1989 and lasted until 1999.
Klamath County authorities began an investigation and Shaw and Cravitz were charged with multiple counts of rape and sodomy for forcing two children under the age of 10 to have sex with each other, Costello said. One of the children was also raped by an adult, she said.
Costello, who was not the district attorney at the time, said she has not had time to review the entire 254-page discovery file and didn’t know if the children were the couple’s biological children or were runaways or kidnap victims.
At some point in the investigation, she said, another woman came forward to say she had been kidnapped by the couple at a young age and had borne a son fathered by Shaw. The young woman — who is not one of the two alleged victims in the current case — had escaped but her son remained in the house, Costello said.
The FBI took over the search for the fugitives and for years, there were no breakthroughs. At one point, Costello said her office was told they had moved to Alaska.
“They had been on the run for a long time. They always lived in rural areas,” she said. “They didn’t have a lot of contact with people and they moved constantly.”
The couple apparently had lived south of Greenville, Mississippi, for about 15 years and supported themselves through Cravitz’s work cleaning houses and Shaw’s woodworking art, which he sold locally, said Brett Carr, an FBI spokesman in Mississippi.
The case cracked open when Shaw, now 72, developed a serious infection and Cravitz took him to a Mississippi hospital, where he died of natural causes.
Cravitz used an alias while making his funeral arrangements, which triggered an FBI flag when the undertaker tried to prepare a death certificate, Costello and the FBI said.
Jurors blame L.A. social workers for repeated sexual abuse of El Monte girl and award her $45 million
Richard Winton
Jurors awarded $45.4 million Thursday to a girl who suffered two years of sexual abuse in an El Monte home where county social workers left her despite evidence showing that an accused molester lived in the house.
The Department of Children and Family Services, jurors found, ignored warning signs of potential abuse and failed to tell police what they knew, leaving the then-7-year-old to be molested by at least four men whom her mother invited into the home.
Jurors deliberated four and half hours before deciding to make the massive award. They attributed 45% of the blame for the girl’s ordeal to DCFS, a finding that requires the county to pay more than $20 million of the verdict.
“She endured two years of sex abuse you cannot imagine,” said David Ring, an attorney for the girl’s father, who sued the agency and the perpetrators on behalf of his daughter. “The Department of Children and Family Services is the last line of defense for defenseless children, and they walked away here and let her be abused.”
The girl’s mother and four men were previously convicted of sexual abuse in connection with the girl’s case.
DCFS Director Bobby Cagle said in a brief statement that the jury “reached the wrong conclusion” and that “the county remains steadfast in its efforts to protect the lives of children as we explore all our legal options. Nothing will shake our commitment to our mission of keeping kids safe.”
At the heart of the lawsuit was whether two DCFS social workers had reasonable suspicion the girl was being abused.
Social workers started providing services to the child in December 2009 after her mother reported that a man she had a relationship with had physically abused her and her children.
The lawsuit said the workers discovered that a different man living at the home, Louis Fluet, had previously been arrested on suspicion of child annoyance and molestation involving another child. He hadn’t been charged in that case, but the social workers concluded that Fluet’s presence in the home placed the girl at a high risk of being sexually abused, according to court documents.
The social workers did not refer the girl to see a forensic child abuse expert, who might have been able to discover that Fluet already had begun molesting her, Ring said.
Social workers demanded Fluet leave the home after the child told them she was sharing a room with him. Despite claims by the girl’s mother that Fluet had left, the workers later learned from the girl’s teacher and grandmother that he was still at the home, but they took no action, the lawsuit alleged.
The workers discovered that Fluet was taking the child to school and was sometimes alone with her, according to court documents.
The lawsuit said the girl’s mother abused drugs and allowed sex offenders and other criminals to live in the home. From 2010 to 2012, the child estimated that about 15 men raped or sexually abused her in other ways, according to the suit.
“She had no idea how to act as a 9- or 10-year-old,” Ring said. “She will need a lifetime of therapy.”
In court, Ring said he argued that Elbis Severo, one of the main social workers handling the case, rushed to close it. “They were mandatory reporters and they never reported it to law enforcement,” Ring said.
During the trial, county attorneys argued that the abuse occurred after DCFS closed its case. The lawyers contended that DCFS workers did all they could and did not know enough about what was going on in the home to remove the girl from her mother until 2012, when she told her father’s girlfriend about the abuse. Ring acknowledged that the county did not know that the other three men eventually convicted of abuse sometimes stayed at the home.
In addition to finding the county legally liable for 45% of the award, jurors attributed another 45% to the girl’s mother and 10% to the four men convicted of sexually abusing her. Ring said he doubted the mother or the men would be able to pay the full amount.
The entire award included $30 million for future emotional suffering, $15 million for past emotional suffering and $400,000 for the child’s future therapy.
Troopers arrest Louisiana man for
distribution of child pornography
By: Sharon Cummings
Louisiana State Troopers have arrested a Rayville man for possession and distribution of child pornography.
In June 2018, investigators assigned to the Louisiana State Police Special Victim’s Unit began an undercover child exploitation investigation involving images/videos of child sexual abuse. As part of the investigation, a search warrant was served today at a residence in Rayville by the Louisiana State Police, FBI Task Force Agents and the Richland Parish Sheriff’s Office.
While serving the search warrant, investigators found evidence indicating 23-year-old Charles O’Neal possessed images of child sex abuse. During questioning, O’Neal admitted he downloaded and shared these images.
O’Neal was arrested on 20 counts of possession and distribution of pornography involving juveniles and was booked into the Richland Parish Detention Center. His bond is set at $500,000.00.
The investigation is continuing.
Anyone with information about individuals engaged in the distribution or possession of child pornography is asked to call the Louisiana State Police Special Victims Unit at 318-487-5099 or to report it online by visiting www.lsp.org and clicking the suspicious activity link.
New Jersey Man Charged With Distributing Pictures Of Child Sex Abuse
By Daniel Hubbard, Patch Staff
BERGEN COUNTY, NJ — A local man was arrested and charged Thursday with distributing child pornography, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito announced.
George Karkantzelis, 27, of Cliffside Park, was arrested at his home by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, Carpenito said.
Karkantzelis allegedly used peer-to-peer file-sharing programs on his computer to distribute files containing images and videos of child sexual abuse, including images of prepubescent children, Carpenito said.
Karkantzelis made his initial appearance today before U.S. Magistrate Court Judge Steven C. Mannion. He was released into the custody of a third party, Carpenito said.
Karkantzelis faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and a $250,000 fine if convicted of the charge filed against him.
Bergen Co., NJ
No comments:
Post a Comment