PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Daily News
WILLIAM BENDER, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER BENDERW@PHILLYNEWS.COM, 215-854-5255
POSTED: Wednesday, January 29, 2014
WHEN BILL Johnson moved into a Dallas apartment complex in October 2012, a neighbor named James rolled out the welcome wagon. Sort of.
“Oh, great, another old queen moving in,” James said as Johnson and his friends unloaded his belongings at Crescent View Apartments in the Texas city’s Oak Lawn section.
Johnson, 54, an unemployed financial adviser, figured that James was just being nice, one gay man to another in the “gayborhood.”
“I think he was trying to be friendly and joking,” Johnson said. “He doesn’t have a muffler on his mouth, as my mama used to say.”
Johnson had no way to know it at the time, but the neighbor was James Brzyski, a defrocked priest described in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office’s 2005 grand-jury report as one of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s “most brutal abusers.”
The 6-foot-5 Brzyski allegedly preyed on at least 17 altar boys in the 1970s and ’80s, subjecting them to “unrelenting abuse, including fondling, oral sex and rape,” according to the report.
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