MISSOURI
National Catholic Reporter
Brian Roewe | Oct. 14, 2014
INDEPENDENCE, MO.
He came into the courtroom late Friday afternoon and spoke without equivocation.
“I have never seen him touch or harm anyone,” Jeff Barlow said of Msgr. Thomas O’Brien, the now-deceased priest of the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese accused of forcing four altar boys into various sexual acts on numerous occasions in the early 1980s.
While other witnesses brought by the defense have made similar statements during the course of the now-two-week trial, Barlow’s words carried greater weight because he is the only living altar boy among the three that Jon David Couzens has alleged were sexually abused alongside him.
Couzens brought a lawsuit against the diocese in 2011, alleging that O’Brien sexually abused him, Barlow and two other boys between fifth and eighth grade at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Independence.
Couzens has stated that he blocked out the memories of the abuse for much of his life, recalling them once briefly in high school during a meeting with a priest and more recently after a friend called him in May 2011 with concerns that her daughter had been sexually abused.
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