CONNECTICUT
Journal Inquirer
By Alex Wood
Journal Inquirer
After law enforcement officers found silencers, material for making pipe bombs, and other contraband on the East Windsor property where teenager Kyle Bass lived in 2013, Bass told them that his priest, the Rev. Paul A. Gotta, had paid for several of the items, including a gun.
He said the gun and thousands of rounds of ammunition were hidden in a bin beneath the stairs of the rectory of St. Phillip Church on South Main Street, one of two Roman Catholic parishes in East Windsor that Gotta served as administrator.
Agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and East Windsor police subsequently visited the rectory and received consent to search it. Gotta denied ever receiving a gun from Bass, and the agents found nothing beneath the basement stairs, although they saw scrape marks on the floor, indicating that something heavy had been dragged across it.
A few days later, ATF received a call from Gotta’s lawyer, who said he wanted to give them something. They returned to the rectory and were given a bin identical to the one Bass had described, weighing several hundred pounds.
Gotta said nothing about the contents of the bin and didn’t even give the agents a key to it. When the agents broke the lock, they found a .357-caliber handgun, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and a survival guide.
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