PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
Friday, January 18, 2013
By Ralph Cipriano
for bigtrial.net
Two moms who volunteered as school lunch room aides told a jury today that they thought former Catholic school teacher Bernard Shero was creepy.
“He’s always been awkward, touch-feely,” Denise Sosalski said. She met Shero when he was a teaching assistant at Nazareth Academy. Sosalski said she volunteered at Nazareth when her son Roman, now 24, was 8 or 9.
While working in the lunchroom, Sosalksi said, she noticed Shero “had a tendency to want to put his hand on their backs,” meaning elementary school kids. Then, when her son was in sixth grade, he was out skateboarding with some friends, Sosalski testified. He came home and said that Shero, who lived in their Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood, had invited the boy and his friends into his house.
Sosalski said she walked over to confront Shero. “He was out on his lawn,” she told the jury. She said she told Shero, “I’m Roman’s mother; stay away from my kid.”
Defense lawyers asked Sosalski when she decided to come forward to testify against Shero about events that happened back in the late 1990s. This week, she said, when a detective knocked on her door.
Apparently the district attorney’s office never stops working a case.
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