NEW JERSEY
The Record
Sunday, November 18, 2012
BY MARY JO LAYTON
STAFF WRITER
The Record
As Richard Schultz tells it, his childhood ended in a trailer at a Boy Scout camp when his troop leader stripped him, tied him up and took Polaroids of the 13-year-old boy “modeling” Stations of the Cross.
“Rape victims talk of having this disconnected feeling from the body and going numb, which is how I was,” Schultz said.
Seven weeks later, his younger brother Christopher was sexually assaulted by the same troop leader. It happened, Schultz said, on his brother’s 12th birthday.
The abuse is described in graphic detail in File No. 1524 in recently released documents from the Boy Scouts of America, which identify thousands of scoutmasters and other volunteers the organization suspected of molesting children.
The faded police statements, letters warning of a predator and other documents in the file tell the story of the Schultz family: The molestation did more than damage two boys, it triggered a series of events that ripped the family apart. A child was lost, a marriage imploded. Thirty-five years later, Richard Schultz continues to be haunted by what happened in that trailer.
Schultz is now a 48-year-old police sergeant in Fair Lawn, always in uniform, always on patrol, a voice for victims in the most recent sex-abuse scandal sweeping the nation. He speaks about the abuse in candid detail — how Robert E. Coakley, a Franciscan friar who also taught at the Catholic school the boys attended in Emerson — lured him into that trailer at the Scout camp in New York State.
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