CAMDEN (NJ)
Press of Atlantic City
Dec. 4, 2019
By Molly Bilinski
Former Roman Catholic Brother Walter Hicks sexually abused a boy while the boy was in second and third grade in the late 1970s at Pleasantville’s St. Peter’s school, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in Camden County Superior Court.
“I went to Catholic school for three years, and two of these years were torture,” said Michael Troiano, who is identified as John Doe in the lawsuit but spoke at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “When I would tell my family that I didn’t want to go to school and I was afraid of my abuser — I didn’t know the words to say, ‘I am being sexually violated by an adult.’ … Those words, a child doesn’t know.”
Hicks “engaged in unpermitted sexual contact” with Troiano, according to the suit, and officials in the Diocese of Camden should have known Hicks was not “fit to work with children” or should have learned of his “propensity to commit sexual abuse.”
At least three civil suits have been filed claiming members of the Roman Catholic Church abused minors in South Jersey and alleging negligence on the part of church leaders since Sunday, when a state law took effect allowing sex abuse victims to sue until they turn 55, or within seven years of their first realization the abuse caused them harm.
The previous limit was two years. More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed against the Diocese of Camden and the Archdioceses of Philadelphia and Newark so far.
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