Fr. Robert J. Hoeffner

In a 2024 police report, a young man said that Hoeffner had inappropriately touched him as a 7th-9th grader, 2012-2014, when Hoeffner was assigned to St. Joseph’s Parish and School in Palm Bay and the boy was a student and parishioner. He said the priest would have boys come to his home to do yard work. Hoeffner was killed 1/28/2024 by the man’s former classmate and childhood friend, along with Hoeffner’s sister, Sally, with whom he lived, and the former classmate’s grandfather. Police shot and killed the assailant. After the murders, police found a folder in Hoeffner’s office with 46 handwritten notes of stories about child sexual abuse. The night before he was murdered, his assailant texted Hoeffner that he was coming over, and the assailant wrote “You have woken up all of Egypt…Ancient ones know what you have done.” The assailant’s family speculated that he had been abused by Hoeffner, and that he had been behaving erratically prior to the killings. In 5/2025 the man who came forward after Hoeffner’s death filed a lawsuit against the Diocese. He said that Hoeffner used confession to target him, and that Hoeffner’s sister would facilitate “meetings” in Hoeffner’s bedroom between the priest and the boys. Further, a student allegedly told a school counselor he was worried about Hoeffner taking boys into classrooms alone, but nothing was done.