AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
ONE year ago tonight Belmont North man John Pirona had dinner with his wife Tracey and their two daughters, left the family home and wrote a letter.
Tracey Pirona found the letter the next morning, with its devastating final words “Too much pain”, and rang police.
Her husband’s body was found five days later.
John Pirona was 12 in 1979 when he was sexually assaulted by a notorious Hunter paedophile priest. He was a victim of the priest one year after both a school principal, Father Tom Brennan, and the then Maitland-Newcastle Bishop Leo Clarke, were told the priest was molesting students.
John Pirona was a NSW fireman who rang me three or four times in the year before his death to say hello and talk about how he was going. Pirona, like many victims of the notorious priest, was distressed by the Catholic Church’s failure to act after Brennan was convicted in 2009 of making a false statement to police.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.