NEW JERSEY
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
Posted by David Clohessy on February 04, 2013
A New Jersey Catholic priest – who pled guilty to molesting a Jersey City boy in the early 1980s – will stay locked up until he goes on trial for molesting three Missouri boys in the late 1980s, a judge has ruled on Friday.
Lawyers for the cleric, Fr. Jerry Howard, claimed that the statute of limitations had expired on his crimes. But Cooper County Missouri Circuit Judge Robert Koffman disagreed, and ordered the case to go to trial.
Fr. Howard – who worked in the Newark diocese as Fr. Carmine Sita before he changed his name in the early 1980’s – has been behind bars since April of 2010, when he was arrested in New Jersey and sent back to Missouri. He was indicted on three counts of forcible sodomy, three counts of attempted forcible sodomy, and two counts of kidnapping. The charges say that he abused at least three boys between 1983 and 1988 while he was working at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Boonville, MO.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.