For John Pirona the Light Shone Too Late

By Joanne Mccarthy
Newcastle Herald
August 1, 2013

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1678645/for-john-pirona-the-light-shone-too-late/?cs=306

LATEISHA Pirona, 8, sleeps with a heart locket beneath her pillow.

"That's Daddy," said her mother Tracey Pirona.

"The heart is her Daddy and he's close to her each night."

It is one year since John Pirona's disappearance, the discovery of his body five days later, and his funeral on August 8, 2012.

It is less than nine months since Mr Pirona's suicide became the catalyst of the Newcastle Herald's Shine the Light campaign that led to the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into child sex abuse allegations, and the federal Royal Commission into child sex abuse.

It is only now that Mr Pirona's daughters Lateisha and Siennah, 12, have started asking questions about their father's death.

It is only now that Tracey Pirona is able to ask her own questions about why it took her husband's death for governments to act on historic child sex abuse.

"There is some justice being done, but I think about how long would this have gone on?" she said.

"It shouldn't have to be that someone's life had to be taken for people to act, after the gate's shut, after John's gone.

"For our family to be put in the position of having to speak at such a time, so that people would understand how devastating this is, and there are so many people who have taken their lives because of this."

Mr Pirona - a victim of John Denham, one of Australia's most infamous paedophile priests - was not living at the family home at Belmont North at the time of his death, but Mrs Pirona's last words to him were: "We'll get through this."

"John tried and tried for years, like so many others have tried to deal with the pain of being sexually abused as children," she said.

"So many families have been going through hell because of what the Catholic Church has done, what it has allowed to happen.

"In his last letter John said it was 'Better for me to go nobly than be a depressing influence in my girls' lives'. No one who hasn't experienced what John experienced can really understand what he was feeling, but the pain for these victims just keeps going.

"There's not that silence inside and I think that's what he needed. That silence."

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