CALIFORNIA
Metropolitan News-Enterprise
By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer
The Court of Appeal for this district Friday upheld a judgment rejecting a claim against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno over alleged child molestation more than three decades ago.
Div. Eight said jurors at the 2009 trial in Fresno Superior Court were correctly instructed that they could not find the church liable unless it knew that Monsignor Anthony Herdegen before the plaintiffs were molested, and that such knowledge could not be inferred from “innocuous or ambiguous” evidence.
Jurors unanimously agreed that Herdegen, then a priest at St. John’s Catholic Church in Wasco, molested brothers George and Howard Santillan. Evidence showed that George Santillan was abused from 1959, when he was 10 years old, until 1965, and that his brother was molested from 1960, when he was six, until 1973.
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