TOLEDO (OH)
Toledo Blade
By MIKE KELLY
BLADE STAFF WRITER
For almost 20 years, Toledo fireman Tony Comes carried around a painful secret from his past: Starting at the age of 14, he says, he had been repeatedly molested by a Catholic priest — a religion teacher at Central Catholic High School and a friend, someone he’d known and trusted.
Comes’ shame, anger, and embarrassment had been bottled up inside ever since, even as he grew into a seemingly well-adjusted, gregarious adult, got married, and had two children of his own with wife Wendy. He still had occasional nightmares about his teenage abuse, which he’d confided in his wife, but no one else.
Then, three years ago, as reports of sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic Church were becoming headline news in Boston and elsewhere, Comes’ unsettling memories resurfaced and began to eat away at him anew.
But what really shattered his attempts to keep his painful past buried was his family’s move into a new neighborhood, and the horrifying discovery that the man who he says molested him — Dennis Gray, by then no longer a priest — lived just five houses away.