AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE McCARTHY Jan. 12, 2015
A HUNTER group wants an investigation into the deaths of more than 30 former Catholic high school students by suicide, drug overdoses or possible suicide, because of links to known or alleged child sex offenders.
A list with more than 30 names – all male – of boys, teenagers and men has been compiled for a submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, with the youngest aged just 13 when he took his life in his bedroom, and the most recent suicide early last year.
The list includes three former St Pius X, Adamstown, brothers in the one family who died of suicide and drug-related deaths, and two brothers from another Catholic Hunter family who took their own lives aged 16 and 22.
It also includes the names of three students who were in the same year at a Hunter Catholic high school during a period when men who had regular contact with the school went on to be charged with child sex offences years later.
One of the three students was 13 when he died in 1974, the second drove a car over a cliff in 1977 aged 16, and the third died after an incident at Merewether in the 1980s, when he was in his early 20s.
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