CANADA
Times Colonist
The Canadian Press
IQALUIT, Nunavut – There’s a smell that brings it all back.
One whiff, and once again he’s a little boy being raped by a priest in a dank furnace room at the Catholic mission in Igloolik, Nunavut.
“Whenever I smell moldy wood, it takes me back to that place,” the man told a court in Iqaluit on Monday during the sentencing hearing for his onetime tormentor. “It makes me angry.”
Eric Dejaeger, a defrocked Oblate priest, was convicted last fall for 32 sex crimes ranging from indecent assault to bestiality against Inuit children. A long lineup of his former victims, who were children between 1978 and 1982 when the assaults occurred, are finally getting their chance to tell Dejaeger what he did to them in a two-day hearing which began under heavy security.
More than a dozen people were expected to testify on Monday, including the man haunted by that odour.
Dejaeger left him with lingering medical and mental problems, he said. He said he lost his job in Igloolik last year because Dejaeger’s trial upset him so much he couldn’t function.
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