OKLAHOMA
Tulsa World
By LOUISE RED CORN World Correspondent
Published: 4/6/2012
PAWHUSKA –
A Pawhuska preacher who admitted to police that he had touched a teenage girl to “prepare her for her future husband” was convicted late Wednesday of three counts of child sexual abuse and one count of lewd molestation.
Creth Dean Hopkins, 62, was taken to the Osage County Jail at 11 p.m. with no bond allowed as he awaits formal sentencing June 13. The six-man, six-woman jury recommended he serve 20 years on each of the sexual abuse convictions and three years for lewd molestation, centering on the four most specific allegations that Hopkins himself described as part of his “teaching modality.” The jury acquitted him of seven other counts of sexual abuse.
Defense attorney Trevor Reynolds told jurors that the case was impossible to defend because only one charge, alleged to have occurred on the girl’s 14th birthday, was specific; the others were alleged to have occurred within a broad, four-year time frame.
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