Child Victims Act ‘day of reckoning’ looms for diocese, Scouts – and schools

BUFFALO (NY)
The Buffalo News

August 11, 2019

By Maki Becker, Jay Tokasz and Dan Herbeck

She was making a pot of beef and barley soup in 2013 when her phone rang.

It was a detective from the Niagara Falls police. A woman had told police she was sexually abused many years earlier by a Niagara Falls City School District teacher, and that there may have been other victims. The detective asked the woman making soup if she was one of them.

“I dropped an entire bottle of parsley in the pot I was so shocked,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be published.

She says her music teacher, Patrick Kuciewski, began sexually abusing her in the seventh grade. Because of New York State’s statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases, which only allowed victims to pursue charges or file lawsuits up until their 23rd birthday, it was too late for the woman or police to do anything.

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