HARTFORD (CT)
Hartford Courant
February 7, 2019
By Dave Altimari
A former Hartford Archdiocese priest, whose career started at a Catholic school in Naugatuck, will go on trial in Albuquerque, N.M., this month on charges of sexually assaulting one of his altar boys at a New Mexico Air Force Base and a national cemetery 27 years ago.
It has been a circuitous route for Arthur Perrault, who was ordained as a Hartford priest in 1964, sent to New Mexico for psychological evaluation at a now infamous treatment center and transferred to the Santa Fe Archdiocese, before fleeing to Morocco in 1992 only to be expelled last year and returned to New Mexico to face federal charges of aggravated sexual abuse and aggravated sexual contact.
The now 82-year-old Perrault — who, records show, once wrote a letter to a victim’s family claiming he had molested their son because he had cancer when he didn’t — fled the United States in 1992 when he learned that a series of lawsuits alleging he had sexually assaulted as many as 38 boys in New Mexico were about to be filed, court records show. He lived in an apartment in Tangier teaching at an all-boys school, until FBI agents — after getting the King of Morocco to agree to expel him from the kingdom — swooped in and arrested him in September of 2017. He has been held in a federal prison ever since, after a judge ruled him a flight risk and a danger to society.
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