Church leader guilty of nine assaults

CANADA
Owensound Sun Times

By Scott Dunn, Sun Times, Owen Sound
Tuesday, May 10, 2016

OWEN SOUND – It didn’t take much to set off Fred King, the leader of a small, isolated church in Chatsworth Township.

Sometimes he’d deliver “corrections and chastisements” by punching, kicking or spitting on parishioners, an Owen Sound court heard Tuesday. Other times he used humiliation or did something such as squeezing a child’s hand with crushing force for fighting with a sister.

The victims were his parishioners. In one case when a teen tried to run away, his grandmother tattled and Fred King, who was known simply as “The Prophet,” retaliated fiercely with a beating at a Sunday church service.

“The blows were all over his body, sometimes on the back of his head, but mostly on his arms and legs,” Grey County Crown attorney Michael Martin said while reading into the court record a statement of facts agreed to by Crown and defence.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.