SALT LAKE CITY (UT)
Salt Lake Tribune [Salt Lake City UT]
July 29, 2025
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
It pledges to ensure the “safety of children, young people and vulnerable adults.”
[Photo above: William Hambleton meets with Pope John Paul II in his office in Vatican City in 1998. (William Hambleton)]
In the wake of a Salt Lake Tribune story detailing allegations that a foreign-born priest sexually abused a 16-year-old in the early 1990s in northern Utah, the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City posted a news release Monday, saying it “remains committed to ensuring the safety of children, young people and vulnerable adults.”
The release also says the clergyman, the Rev. Heriberto Mejia — who served in Ogden’s St. Joseph Parish and Payson’s St. Andres Church in 1990-92 — was “permanently removed from ministry in the diocese and left Utah in later 1992 for reasons unrelated to sexual misconduct.”
The Tribune story noted, however, that the diocese itself reported to Payson police in August 2019 that Mejia had “confessed to sexually exploiting two juveniles in 1991” and had since “been deported to Colombia.”
In addition, the diocese, in a 2019 independent review, reported that it received an allegation of sexual abuse against Mejia on Aug. 23, 1991, and that on Oct. 28, 1992, he had his priestly “faculties” removed.
Asked on Monday to explain the release and these earlier accounts, the Rev. John Evans, the diocese’s vicar general, said “we did not have this [police report] in our record.”
But, he added, the diocese “will take it into account” as it continues to investigate.
This case came to light in December 2024, when Bishop Oscar Solis, leader of Utah’s 300,000 Catholics, received a letter from Bill Hambleton, a former educator in the diocese. In it, Hambleton reported for the first time his allegations that Mejia had molested him when he was a teenager.
In the seven months since Solis received Hambleton’s letter, the diocese reported his allegations to law enforcement and “hired two retired law enforcement agents to conduct an independent investigation,” Monday’s release said. “Currently, an additional internal investigation is underway.”
It is crucial that the diocese be “thorough in its internal investigation and determinations,” the release said, “for the sake of truth, justice and healing.”
It requests that “anyone who has any information regarding this allegation or other sexual abuse of a minor to contact the [diocese’s] Office of Safe Environment and the Salt Lake City Police Department.”