NEW MEXICO
Santa Fe Reporter
The untold financial, emotional and spiritual cost of New Mexico’s Catholic priest sex crimes
August 9, 2017
By Matt Grubs
The two friends had laced up and hit the court together many times before. They’d played on the same team in an Albuquerque recreational basketball league for years. In a Bernalillo County league, too. They were in their mid-20s and their lives stretched out before them, disappearing into a horizon of possibilities.
It was the early 1980s, and Brad Hall was looking to blow off steam. He’d soon start classes at the University of New Mexico law school. The rec-league team, a rotating cast of characters, practiced on Sunday afternoons at the Queen of Heaven Catholic School in Albuquerque’s Quigley Park neighborhood.
Every once in a while a priest would wander through, padding along the court. Hall never had a reason to give him a second thought.
He couldn’t have known, though, what his teammate Clifford Esquibel was thinking at that same moment; the horror and fear he must have felt.
A quarter century after the last time Hall can recall seeing his basketball pal, Esquibel walked into his office. “I was the first person he ever told all about being an altar boy in the archdiocese,” Hall says.
Esquibel revealed that the Rev. John George Weisenborn, a priest at a different parish in Albuquerque who had a history of sexual abuse known to the church, had sexually molested him as a boy over the course of several years.
Then, Hall says, Esquibel walked outside and threw up.
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