CONNECTICUT
New Haven Independent
by CHRISTOPHER PEAK | May 11, 2017
Hartford — A bespectacled, ponytailed man reading the true-crime thriller In Cold Blood in the front row of a federal courtroom here was selected as the eighth and final juror who will decide if prominent New Haven Rabbi Daniel Greer repeatedly sexually abused yeshiva students and if the school shirked its duty to intervene.
The jury selection took place Wednesday in U.S. District Court, a day before the scheduled beginning of Greer’s trial.
Eliyahu Mirlis filed a lawsuit making those charges against Greer in May 2016. (The case landed in federal court, rather than state, because the jurisdiction is split, with Mirlis in New Jersey and Greer in Connecticut.) Mirlis’s complaint alleged that Greer repeatedly raped him for three years, starting in 2002, while he attended the Yeshiva of New Haven, one of two Orthodox Jewish schools that Greer ran within the former Roger Sherman School at 765 Elm St. in New Haven’s Edgewood neighborhood. The civil suit contends that Mirlis has suffered from emotional distress and seeks damages for the injury. In a 218-page pretrial deposition, a second former student, who became the school’s assistant principal, spelled out further, separate allegations of being sexually abused by the rabbi, who denies all the accusations.
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