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Catholic Priest in Berlin Connecticut Pleads Guilty to Child Endangerment: Faces 5 Years in Prison
Posted by on May 8, 2013
A Catholic priest faces five years in prison after he admitted in Superior Court on Thursday that he had child pornography on his computer and chatted about sex on the Internet with underage boys.
The Rev. Michael Miller, 43, of Berlin, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography, obscenity and three counts of risk of injury to a minor before Judge Hillary Strackbein. He is expected to be sentenced July 9 to a prison term of 20 years, suspended after five, followed by 20 years of probation.
He used church computers for some of the crimes, his lawyer, William St. John, said outside the courtroom. But St. John said his client was never accused of touching boys.
“He’s extremely remorseful,” St. John said. “There are a lot of people who love this guy.”
He wouldn’t let the priest talk to the media.
Miller will never function as a priest again, said Maria Zone, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Hartford. He was a pastor at St. Paul Roman Catholic Church in Berlin, and his victims were church members, students at the church’s school or both.
He was suspended from public ministry as soon as police told the church about the allegations, Zone said.
According to a warrant for Miller’s arrest, a woman contacted police on July 2, 2011, after learning about a Facebook conversation the priest was having with her 13-year-old son. The priest commented that some professional wrestlers had “nice butts,” the mother said.
She looked up past Facebook chats between the two and learned that the priest had made comments about the boy being in puberty and about how the priest is “addicted to porn” and pleasures himself, the warrant states.
The priest also invited the boy to come over and watch a “dirty movie” so they could “have some fun,” and also wrote in “extreme detail” about sex acts he would perform on the boy, the warrant says.
Miller was arrested on July 11, 2011.
Police also learned about a 16-year-old victim from a social worker. After interviewing that boy, police learned that the priest had emailed to the teen — from a church computer — videos of an unknown person masturbating, according to prosecutor Christian Watson and court documents.
Investigators later identified more teens with whom Miller had inappropriate Facebook chats during an computer analysis conducted at the New Britain Police Department. There were seven all together.
They learned that Miller called another teen — a 15-year-old, according to another warrant — “sexy,” and also told the teen that he engaged in sex acts with members of the priest’s soccer team, Watson said.
Miller told another juvenile that he was bisexual, the warrant states. That boy told police that the priest started out talking about online video games, school and sports, but gradually moved on to sexual topics.
The computer examination also turned up five pornographic videos of children, including one with boys ages 6 to 10 performing sex acts on each other and another involving a younger girl and an adult.
Miller was arrested again on June 14, 2012.
In a joint statement, the archdiocese and Miller’s order, the Franciscan Friars Conventual, said Miller’s guilty pleas follow “many months of personal deliberation, reflection and prayer. During this time, Miller has received medical treatment and undergone therapy.
“We hope that Miller’s plea will give some solace and closure to the minors he violated — and their families. We will continue to pray for them so that they will continue to heal from this regrettable experience.”
The Hartford Courant, Christine Dempsey
Newtown Connecticut Man Faces Sentencing for Child Sex Assault and Porn
Posted by on May 1, 2013
A Newtown man is facing sentencing for sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl and taking photos and video of the abuse.
Twenty-nine-year-old Edward Wilson is to be sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Hartford. He pleaded guilty in February to producing child pornography and faces 21 to 26 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. Read more of this post
Walk a Mile in Her Shoes to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence Event in Fairfield, April 27th
Posted by on April 26, 2013
On Saturday, April 27th, a Walk a Mile in Her Shoes event will be held in Fairfield, Connecticut at 9 am. The event will be benefit The Center of Women and Families of Eastern Fairfield County. At the end of the event Dawn Daniels mother of Jerry Sandusky’s first victim along with his therapist will speak.
Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® The International Men’s March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence is a project of Venture Humanity, Inc. a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit corporation. Men literally walk one mile in women’s high heeled shoes to protest sexualized violence, educate their communities and raise money for chronically underfunded rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters and other sexualized violence prevention and recovery services.
The Center for Women and Families is a domestic violence and sexual assault agency. The Center provides free and confidential services to victims of Domestic Violence, Sexual Violence, and severe child sexual and/or physical abuse. Our services are offered to residents of Bridgeport, Easton, Fairfield, Monroe, Stratford, and Trumbull.
REGISTRATION, START POINT, AND PARKING INFORMATION
Registration opens at 8:30 AM. Please arrive no later than 8:50 AM.
Start Point is at The Fairfield Train Station (165 Unquowa Road, Fairfield).
FREE Parking is available at The Fairfield Train Station.
EVENT SCHEDULE
The Walk will start at approximately 9:00 AM at the Fairfield Train Station and ends at the Fairfield Town Hall on Old Post Road with a closing ceremony and refreshments to follow.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Child Abuse Prevention Month
Posted by on April 15, 2013
The following has been taking out of excerpts from several letters to the editor from different organizations around Fairfield County including The Center for Women and Families of Eastern Fairfield County, Family and Children’s Aid and Women’s Center of Greater Danbury.
The news media provides us with daily reminders that child sexual abuse is real, and it happens close to home as evident by the recent allegations of the fencing coach in Fairfield, Connecticut or watching famous pitcher R.A. Dickey explain his childhood abuse on 60 Minutes.
It is difficult to accept that sexual abuse is a problem in our community, but if we want it to stop, we have to acknowledge it, and we have to talk about it. Ending child sexual abuse is possible, but it will require all adults to educate themselves, have early and ongoing conversations with children, and model healthy behaviors.
Child sexual abuse thrives in silence. Read more of this post
Fencing Coach Accused of Student Sex Assault in Fairfield, Connecticut
Posted by on April 13, 2013
A man who served as the fencing coach at public high schools in Fairfield, Connecticut has been arrested, accused of sexually assaulting a female Fairfield public school student.
John Tejada, 36, of Cheshire, was arrested at Fairfield Police Department on Thursday on a warrant charging him with sexual assault in the second degree.
Police said Tejada coached the Fairfield Warde and Ludlowe high school fencing teams from 2010 to 2012 and the arrest stems from an incident in 2012, in which he is accused of sexually assaulting a public school student.
Tejada was also a fencing coach at Wakeman’s Boys and Girls Club in Southport and was the primary coach at the Fairfield Fencing Academy, at 85 Mill Plain Road, Fairfield, Connecticut, according to Fairfield police. Read more of this post
Miss Porter’s Teacher Charged With Sexually Assaulting Student
Posted by on March 27, 2013
A former teacher at Miss Porter’s School has been charged with sexual assault for having sexual contact with a student at the girls’ school.
Joseph Prem Rajkumar, 42, was charged with two counts of second-degree sexual assault and one count of fourth-degree sexual assault.
He was charged under the section of the law that makes it illegal for a school employee to engage in sexual conduct with a student.
The warrant for Rajkumar’s arrest is sealed and police declined to release much information because their investigation is continuing. Detectives took him into custody Monday afternoon and he was arraigned Tuesday in Superior Court in Hartford, where a judge set his bail at $500,000. He remains in custody. Read more of this post
LA schools settle claims over lewd ‘tasting games’ Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/crime/article/LA-schools-settle-claims-over-lewd-tasting-games-4349214.php#ixzz2NRjPXtRE
Posted by on March 13, 2013
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles school district will pay millions of dollars to settle claims and lawsuits filed by students and families from an elementary school where a third-grade teacher was accused of spoon-feeding children semen in what he called “tasting games,” lawyers in the cases said Tuesday.
District officials did not reveal the total amount of the settlement, but attorney Raymond Boucher, who represents several Miramonte Elementary School students, said each claimant will receive $470,000. Read more of this post
YMCA Counselor Arrested for Child Porn
Posted by on February 25, 2013
An employee at the Westerly YMCA and a camp counselor at the YMCA’s Camp Harrington in Massachusetts has been arrested and charged with possession and transmission of child pornography.
Dana Gingerelli, 20 of Westerly R.I., was arrested on Thursday morning by Rhode Island State Police. Police initiated the investigations after reports that child pornography was being shared on the internet. Upon search of Gingerelli’s residence on Canton Street in Westerly a smartphone with child pornography on it was discovered. Futher investigation revealed that the phone belonged to Gingerelli and that the illegal images had also been transferred from the device. Read more of this post
What went wrong in the Catholic Church? Why have its leaders been unable to deal with the priest sex abuse scandal in an honest and convincing way?
Posted by on February 12, 2013
The files released last week by America’s largest Catholic archdiocese revealed new and disturbing details about how church officials schemed to protect priests accused of molesting children. But was the scandal in Los Angeles really so much worse than in other places?
Sadly, no. The details emerging from the documents mirror what happened in archdioceses across the country, as church officials time and again put their own concerns above the needs of victims.
One of the earliest cases to draw nationwide attention involved Gilbert Gauthe, a priest who raped dozens of boys in rural Louisiana. By 1984, when Gauthe was indicted on 34 counts of sex crimes against children, church officials had been aware he was abusing children for at least a decade. But instead of reporting his crimes, they transferred him to another parish, where he continued to have sex with the children in his charge. He was stopped only after a boy he raped wound up in the hospital due to his injuries.
In the nearly three decades since the Gauthe case, more than 6,000 priests were, by the church’s own definitions, “credibly” or “not implausibly” accused of raping or sexually abusing children and adolescents. Read more of this post
The Price of a Stolen Childhood – Restitution for Victims of Child Porn
Posted by on February 1, 2013
This article was a feature story in The New York Times Magazine last week. It speaks of victims of child pornography and possible restitution they may receive. The story features 2 victims and their struggles into adulthood.
The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.
The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.
Nicole’s parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to “play games” like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he’d done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.
Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he’d ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. “It was all so hidden,” she told me. “And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: ‘You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.’ ”
When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father’s house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn’t think he showed them to anyone. A few months later, while her father was out on bail, Nicole was using a computer he gave her to work on a presentation for Spanish class when she came across a file with a vulgar name that she couldn’t open. She showed it to her mother and stepfather, and they brought the computer to the police.A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime — producing the videos — and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn’t realize that Nicole’s father had also distributed the images.
A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime — producing the videos — and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn’t realize that Nicole’s father had also distributed the images. Read more of this post
