A four-month Washington Post investigation of former Manassas teacher Kevin Ricks' career as a teacher, tutor, foreign exchange host and camp counselor has revealed a pattern of abuse that goes back to at least 1978 and has left a trail of victims that spans the globe.
Kevin Ricks was a gregarious, well-traveled English teacher at Osbourn High School, a Walt Whitman devotee who was so popular that a photo of him in class was chosen to fill the opening page of the yearbook. A writer and photographer himself, Ricks would walk the halls of the Manassas school with a leather-bound journal of his musings tucked in his bag, next to his laptop computer.
What teachers, parents, students and even his wife didn't know was that his journals contained decades of dark secrets, a running handwritten commentary of Ricks's world of obsession, infatuation, pursuit, sexual abuse and international child exploitation...
But despite the abuse, Ricks moved from one teaching job to the next over nearly 30 years, navigating the nation's public and private school systems undetected, evading traps designed to catch him...
His case underscores the difficulties that educators and parents face when they only suspect abuse but can't prove it, and how reluctant even the most suspicious and well-meaning people can be in coming forward with allegations. It shows how someone can for decades wear a mask of trusted role model while using that powerful position to lure unsuspecting boys...
I think that a separate, flourishing community for pedophiles could attract people who have never committed a crime, but have come to realize that they are pedophiles. They might voluntarily enter the community to stop themselves from harming children. The only thing I disagree with is using Santa Rosa Island; I'm sure another location can be found.
California gubernatorial candidate Douglas Hughes has made quite a name for himself in recent weeks -- not so much by surging ahead in the polls, but rather by promising, if elected, to create a "Pedophile Island" for convicted sex offenders...
Hughes, a 73-year-old Republican and retired business owner, has been a resident of California since 1955. According to his political profile, he believes his biggest assets as a candidate are his relationship with God and his "practice of moral principles." His top priorities are children, jobs and border control.
If elected governor, Hughes says, he will give all convicted pedophiles a choice: remain in prison for life, leave California permanently or live on Pedophile Island -- a self-supporting, downright Utopian community he has envisioned.
California gubernatorial candidate Douglas Hughes believes Santa Rosa Island, in Channel Islands National Park off the coast of southern California, would be a good spot to maroon convicted sex offenders.
"On the island, they can live their life out there, farming and ranching," Hughes said. "They can be their own entity, and it won't cost the taxpayers a dime."...
The fact that these cases keep popping up around the country, with outrageous false accusations that no normal person would take seriously, is an indication of how dysfunctional our justice system is. How do police manage to ignore the warning signs of a child custody suit gone wrong, and witnesses who admit they're lying?
“I want to make people aware that this can happen any time, anywhere, to anyone,” she said. “The children that are part of false accusations are just as devastated as those who are truly molested.”
Former Ringgold teacher Tonya Craft appeared live on NBC’s “Today” show this morning, a day after being acquitted on charges she molested three young girls...
"Today" host Meredith Vieira interviewed Craft, her husband and her lawyer. Craft told Vieira that she had been worried about the verdict after researching other cases involving false accusations.
“I almost couldn’t let myself think there was going to be a not guilty,” she said. “I never thought I could be arrested for something I didn’t do, so I absolutely had to expect the worst.”
Craft also talked about her daughter — one of the alleged victims — testifying for the prosecution, and how the children truly believed something happened to them.
“That was the absolute hardest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she said. “There was no anger towards her. It absolutely broke my heart.”
There have been death threats made against Craft since the verdict, the interview revealed.
But Craft’s focus now is on regaining custody of her children, and educating others on the effects of false accusations...
Ex-kindergarten teacher Tonya Craft was found not guilty today of 22 counts of child molestation. The Tonya Craft verdict was announced at about 5:30 today.
The jury read the not guilty verdict to all 22 accounts, including molestation, sexual battery, and aggravated molestation.
The Tonya Craft verdict may have gotten Craft out of going to prison, but Craft's life will never be the same. Since she was arrested for molestation, Craft has lost her job and her house...
This case sounds an awful lot like the Dale Akiki and Jim Wade cases here in San Diego. I must say this about our District Attorney, Bonnie Dumanis: as much as I am appalled by the abuses of her Public Integrity Unit (now defunct), at least she never did anything this insane.
The timing of these accusations was extremely convenient for the ex-husband of the accused, who who waging a child-custody battle against the accused.
"As the trial continued, many conflicting details emerged. One of the alleged victims admitted to lying in a previously taped interview, and another said she was promised a toy for talking to police. Other times, witnesses said they could not remember pertinent details of the case."
Supporters of Tonya Craft are speaking out as both sides anxiously await a verdict today in the five-week trial of the former northwest Georgia elementary school teacher accused of molesting three young girls. Craft's supporters called the entire ordeal a "sham" that should never have been allowed to occur.
"It's divided the community between those who are intelligent and can think for themselves and those who are blindly led," local resident Harmony Lefler told AOL News. "It's horrible to say that, but it is the truth."
Keri Mann, a resident of nearby Chattanooga, Tenn., and a member of the Facebook group Truth for Tonya, agrees.
Tonya Craft arrives at court on May 6, 2010, in Ringgold, Ga. Billy Weeks, AP Tonya Craft arrives at her trial in Ringgold, Ga., on Thursday. She was charged with child molestation in June 2008. "I have not met one person who believes she is guilty," Mann said after closing arguments Monday in Ringgold, Ga. "There are several teachers and former teachers in my family who were all stunned by this case. ... As a future teacher, I am scared to even work in this community because of these allegations."
Craft, a mother of two, was arrested in June 2008, after she was accused of molesting three girls, age 5 and 6. Prosecutors say the incidents occurred at her former residence on Sycamore Drive.
The five-week trial began in Catoosa County Superior Court on April 12. Jurors heard tearful testimony from the three young accusers, who are now 8 and 9 years old, and their parents. One of the alleged victims said Craft molested her "in kindergarten and first grade."
As the trial continued, many conflicting details emerged. One of the alleged victims admitted to lying in a previously taped interview, and another said she was promised a toy for talking to police. Other times, witnesses said they could not remember pertinent details of the case.
A nurse and doctor testified that the three girls in question showed signs "suspicious of sexual abuse," but Dr. Nancy Fajman, a professor of pediatric medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, said she saw nothing suspicious in her review of the forensic photos of the exam.
"I find nothing suspicious about it, and I would report it as a normal examination," Fajman said.
The defense also presented several teachers from Chickamauga Elementary School who said they had no reason to believe Craft had acted inappropriately with any of her students and spoke highly of her as a teacher.
Craft's attorneys argued she was the victim of revenge, following an April 2008 investigation she had initiated when she began to suspect her own children were being abused after her divorce. That investigation, which was later closed, occurred one month before the allegations against Craft surfaced...
An Illinois man is suing the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI for allegedly covering up sexual abuse by a priest at a Catholic school in Wisconsin.
The lawsuit demands the Vatican release the names of thousands of Catholic priests that the suit says have "credible allegations of sexual misconduct" against them...
This story gets more bizarre as it develops. A couple of cardinals seem to argue that they're being hassled for protecting child molesters because they're anti-abortion. I'm Catholic myself, and I'm disgusted with Pope Benedict and his pals.
Some people seem to think that if they do something wrong, the best tactic is to claim to be a victim oneself. They attack instead of apologizing. The Vatican is claiming to be a victim of anti-Catholic hate.
But the Vatican isn't alone in feeling sorry for itself instead of its victims. Religious bigotry is also what San Diego schools attorney Dan Shinoff claims is the motive of one who would criticize his actions. Note to Daniel Shinoff: The recent analogy between persecuted priests and persecuted Jews is the type of analogy that you could rightfully be angry about, as opposed to this. And ironically, sometimes schools you represent defend child molesters in a similar manner to the Vatican.
ROME — A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican’s counterattack.
The remarks, on the day Christians mark the crucifixion, underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and criticism over how it has handled charges of child molestation against priests in the past, and sought to focus attention on the church as the central victim.
In recent weeks, Vatican officials and many bishops have angrily denounced news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980 and once as a leader of a powerful Vatican congregation in the 1990s....
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.
"The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different" agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.
Herranz didn't identify the lobbies but "defense of life" is Vatican shorthand for anti-abortion efforts....
I’m a Catholic woman who makes a living being adversarial. We have a pope who has instructed Catholic women not to be adversarial.
It’s a conundrum.
I’ve been wondering, given the vitriolic reaction of the New York archbishop to my column defending nuns and the dismissive reaction of the Vatican to my column denouncing the church’s response to the pedophilia scandal, if they are able to take a woman’s voice seriously. Some, like Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, seem to think women are trying to undermine the church because of abortion and women’s ordination.
I thought they might respond better to a male Dowd.
My brother Kevin is conservative and devout — his hobby is collecting crèches — and has raised three good Catholic sons. When I asked him to share his thoughts on the scandal, I learned, shockingly, that we agreed on some things. He wrote the following:
“In pedophilia, the church has unleashed upon itself a plague that threatens its very future, and yet it remains in a curious state of denial. The church I grew up in was black and white, no grays. That’s why my father, an Irish immigrant, liked it so much. The chaplain of the Police and Fire departments told me once ‘Your father was a fierce Catholic, very fierce.’
My brothers and I were sleepily at his side for the monthly 8 a.m. Holy Name Mass and the guarding of the Eucharist in the middle of the night during the 40-hour ritual at Easter. Once during a record snowstorm in 1958, we were marched single-file to church for Mass only to find out the priests next door couldn’t get out of the rectory.
The priest was always a revered figure, the embodiment of Christ changing water into wine. (Older parishioners took it literally.) The altar boys would drink the dregs.
When I was in the 7th grade, one of the new priests took four of us to the drive-in restaurant and suggested a game of ‘pink belly’ on the way back; we pulled up a boy’s shirt and slapped his belly until it was pink. When the new priest joined in, it seemed like more groping than slapping. But we thought it was inadvertent. And my parents never would have believed a priest did anything inappropriate anyway. A boy in my class told me much later that the same priest climbed into bed with him in 1958 at a rectory sleepover, but my friend threw him to the floor. The priest protested he was sleepwalking. Three days later, the archbishop sent the priest to a rehab place in New Mexico; he ended up as a Notre Dame professor...
In his book, ‘Goodbye! Good Men,’ author Michael Rose writes that the liberalized rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.
Vatican II liberalized rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy... it ended up shrinking the priest pool and producing the wrong kind of candidates — drawing men confused about their sexuality who put our children in harm’s way.
The church is dying from a thousand cuts. Its cover-up has cost a fortune and been a betrayal worthy of Judas. The money spent came from social programs, Catholic schools and the poor.
This should be a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance.
I asked a friend of mine recently what he would do if his child was molested after the church knew. ‘I would probably kill someone,’ he replied...
Pope Benedict XVI's former diocese in Munich says it is facing new allegations of physical and sexual abuse on a daily basis.
"It is like a tsunami," Elke Huemmeler, head of the diocese's newly founded sexual abuse prevention task force, told The Associated Press.
Huemmeler estimates there are about 120 cases on the record to date, around 100 of them at the nearby Ettal monastery boarding school, run by Benedictine monks. She stresses, however, her role is not to deal with the old cases, but help set up the prevention program.
On Friday, her new Task Force on Sexual Abuse Prevention, now officially commissioned and backed by Archbishop Reinhard Marx, began its work...
When the first abuse cases broke at Ettal about three weeks ago, Huemmeler immediately sat down with four or five colleagues to brainstorm and find a way out of the "disaster", as she calls it...
Huemmeler's group reflects a belief that only through airing the events of the past and increasing transparency future abuse can be prevented.
Marx has said he wants to bring out everything into the open and also named a commission to comb through old records to find out who knew what and when.
The diocese now has three specialists to listen to and investigate victims' allegations of abuse, Huemmeler says. The third was named just this week because the workload has grown immensely in such a short time.
The first step is to take stock of what has happened, to analyze patterns and then find ways to prevent sexual abuse by making people look more closely...
Seattle police have arrested a U.S. Army sergeant and charged him with assaulting his 4-year-old daughter by holding the girl in hot water in an attempt to get her to recite the ABCs.
After receiving a call that 27-year-old Joshua Tabor was drunk and wandering his neighborhood at 2 a.m., police arrived at the man's home in Yelm, Wash., CNN reports...
Police said when they interviewed Tabor's girlfriend and his young daughter from another marriage, they learned that Tabor had held the girl in a sink full of water because he was angry when she couldn't recite the alphabet...
According to police, the girl had severe bruising and scratch marks on her body, and Tabor admitted to holding his daughter in the sink, precisely because she was afraid of water, CNN reported. In the police report, Tabor acknowledged that he had put the girl's head in the sink "three to four times."
"She said the letters after that," Tabor is quoted as saying in the report.
After returning from a 15-month tour in Iraq last year, Tabor has been stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, CNN said. An investigation into the incident is ongoing.
