Lawyers in Boy Scout bankruptcy case to go after local councils’ properties

PAWCATUK (CT)
Westerly Sun

February 19, 2020

By Brady McCombs and Randall Chase

Salt Lake City – Like millions of other Americans the 1950s and ’60s, Duane Ruth-Heffelbower spent his formative years learning to tie knots, build campfires and pitch tents with the Boy Scouts, whose wholesome reputation was burnished by Norman Rockwell’s paintings of fresh-faced Scouts, brave, courteous and cheerful.

Though he’s no longer involved in Scouting, the 70-year-old Mennonite minister from Fresno, California, has followed the slow deterioration of the national Boy Scouts of America from afar and cringes to think what this week’s bankruptcy filing over a blizzard of sex-abuse lawsuits might mean for an organization already grappling with a decline in membership.

“It’s really sad. I’m afraid that people are going to be more skeptical than they were once about the organization and will be more inclined to look for other alternatives to Scouting,” said Ruth-Heffelbower, who grew up in Kansas. “These days there are so many things pulling at kids.”

With its finances and its reputation for moral rectitude damaged by scandal, the Scouts resorted to Chapter 11 bankruptcy Tuesday in hopes of pulling through the crisis by setting up a victims’ compensation fund for thousands of men who were molested as boys by Scout leaders over the decades.

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