CALIFORNIA
Mercury News
By Mark Gomez
mgomez@mercurynews.com
POSTED: 08/23/2013
SAN JOSE — Officials at a San Jose church fired a camp counselor on three separate occasions after reports he inappropriately touched young girls, then gave him a positive 2010 recommendation for a job at a Trace Elementary School child care program, where he is suspected of molesting nine girls, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The latest lawsuit in the case of Keith Woodhouse, 28, was filed by the parents of a girl who claims she was molested by Woodhouse while attending a Church on the Hill summer program in 2007. Woodhouse, who is facing criminal charges in the Trace case, worked at the church in its summer camp program at the time.
“Several executives within this church repeatedly had an opportunity to identify obvious signs of a pedophile in their midst, and each time they not only failed to contact the authorities, as the law required, but they unconscionably allowed him to continue having unsupervised access to minors,” said Robert Allard, an attorney representing the girl and her family.
Allard is also representing the families of three girls claiming to be molested by Woodhouse at Trace in a separate negligence lawsuit against the child care center and the church.
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