BUFFALO (NY)
Buffalo News
August 14, 2019
By Aaron Besecker, Mary B. Pasciak, Matthew Spina, Dan Herbeck and Maki Becker
The only Buffalo Diocese priest in the past 50 years convicted of molesting a child in Western New York is named in a Child Victims Act lawsuit that accuses him of abusing a different child a decade before his arrest.
The Rev. Gerald Jasinski engaged in “unpermitted sexual contact” with an altar boy in the 1970s while he was a priest at St. John Gualbert Church in Cheektowaga, according to the lawsuit.
Jasinski was a priest at St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Lancaster when Wyoming County sheriff’s deputies arrested him June 7, 1986, on felony charges of first-degree sodomy and first-degree sexual abuse and a charge of unlawfully dealing with a child. He was accused of having sexual contact with two boys, ages 15 and 18, at a cabin in the Town of Sheldon.
Jasinski pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of attempted sexual abuse and was sentenced to five years’ probation.
About 114 Child Victims Act lawsuits were filed Wednesday in five Western New York counties over old allegations of sexual abuse.
Nearly all of the people accused of molesting children were Catholic priests.
But the Boy Scouts of America, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the East Aurora School District, the Jesuits and other organizations are also named as defendants. At least 105 of the lawsuits are against the Diocese of Buffalo.
A one-year “look-back” window opened at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday under a new state law that gives abuse victims a year to file claims that previously were prohibited from moving forward in court. Below is a look at some of the lawsuits filed.
The News does not identify sexual abuse victims without their consent.
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