CALIFORNIA
The Modesto Bee
By Sue Nowicki
snowicki@modbee.com
A Stanislaus County Superior Court judge will hear arguments this morning as to whether the only Oliver O’Grady lawsuit ever filed in this county should continue.
The lawsuit names Sacred Heart Parish in Turlock, contending that the Catholic parish — as well as the Stockton Diocese, also named as a defendant — should have known that O’Grady was a pedophile, one who later admitted sexually assaulting more than 23 children of both sexes and sleeping with two mothers to get access to their children.
The lawsuit contends that if one of the world’s most notorious pedophiles had been removed from the priesthood in Turlock instead of shuffled from parish to parish, the alleged victim never would have been molested years later at Stockton’s Church of the Presentation, said Vince Finaldi, an attorney with Manly and Stewart in Southern California, who filed the action.
The victim in the case is a 40-year-old man “who was 11 or 12” when the abuse occurred, Finaldi said. He has two younger siblings — a sister and brother — who filed similar lawsuits in 2005 and 2008; those were settled in 2011 for a combined $2 million in damages. The current lawsuit was filed in 2009.
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