BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun
By Julie Bykowicz
Sun Staff
Originally published February 12, 2005
Dontee Stokes told a crowded Baltimore courtroom yesterday that he was sexually molested by his former priest, whose warm embraces, he testified, turned to inappropriate touches and finally, a sexual assault in a church rectory.
As the trial of now-defrocked priest Maurice Blackwell opened, Stokes, 29, testified that the molestation occurred from 1989 to 1992, while he was a young parishioner at St. Edward Catholic Church in West Baltimore.
"By the time I understood what was going on, it was too late to really do anything," Stokes testified.
A decade later, after a failed investigation into his claims, and at the height of the sexual abuse scandal in the American Catholic church, Stokes shot Blackwell, 58.