VIRGINIA
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Posted: Sunday, June 9, 2013
BY ROBERT ZULLO ∙ Richmond Times-Dispatch
When it was found three days after Christmas, the small pickup truck was still running, idling in a secluded spot at a shuttered rock-and-sand plant off a lonesome stretch of state Route 5 in Charles City County. • A hose ran from the Mazda’s exhaust pipe through the passenger-side window, where it had been taped in place, according to a report by the Charles City Sheriff’s Office. A wallet and a journal with a 10-page suicide note were clearly visible on the dashboard.
The 62-year-old man lying dead inside was David Primeaux, a Virginia Commonwealth University associate professor respected by his colleagues in the university’s computer science department, where he had taught since 1996, and liked by his students, who offered glowing endorsements of his courses in online reviews.
Primeaux was also well-known for his advocacy of historic preservation in Petersburg, where he and his wife bought and renovated a historic home on West Washington Street nearly 13 years ago and where he served as a chairman and trustee of the Historic Petersburg Foundation. …
Indeed, what few people here could have known was that the story that ended in Charles City began 1,100 miles away in the Cajun country surrounding Lafayette, La., where Primeaux grew up and was ordained in 1975 as a Catholic priest.
Primeaux’s tenure there overlapped with a flood of sexual-abuse litigation against the Diocese of Lafayette that was launched before, during and after the 1985 conviction of the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, who was at the center of the first of the high-profile sexual-abuse scandals that would engulf the Catholic church in ensuing decades.
Gauthe wasn’t alone. In 2004, the diocese acknowledged that 15 priests from 1950 to 2002 were the subject of substantiated sexual-abuse complaints involving 123 victims. Primeaux was one of them, the diocese says.
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