PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Daily News
BY MENSAH M. DEAN
Philadelphia Daily News
deanm@phillynews.com 215-854-5949
JUST TWO altar boys are alleged to have been sexually assaulted by three Philadelphia Catholic priests who will stand trial in March with a church official accused of enabling the crimes by covering them up.
But the misdeeds of those priests and of Monsignor William Lynn ensnared a much larger pool of child victims, according to city prosecutors who spent much of yesterday trying to persuade a judge to let a jury hear about those incidents.
The “prior bad acts” hearing before Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina is scheduled to resume this morning at the Criminal Justice Center.
Lynn, 61, a former top administrator for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, is charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Also to be tried are priest James Brennan, 48, charged with raping a 14-year-old boy in the summer of 1996 at his West Chester apartment while on leave from Springfield’s Cardinal O’Hara High School; priest Charles Engelhardt, 65, and defrocked priest Edward Avery, 69, both of whom are accused of raping a boy at St. Jerome Parish in the Northeast beginning in 1998, when the boy was 10.
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