BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun
By Jennifer McMenamin
Sun reporter
Originally published November 9, 2005
With his eyes closed and his head tipped back, Thomas Roberts listened yesterday morning in court to the painful details of the evenings and mornings he spent with his high school chaplain - details that have haunted him since the late 1980s.
Only this time, the 33-year-old former Calvert Hall College student heard them with a sense of relief, exhaustion and vindication.
In the moments before Baltimore County prosecutors read into the record the facts of the case, Jerome F. Toohey Jr., a priest and chaplain at the Towson boys school, had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing Roberts for six months after the high school sophomore came to him in 1987 for counseling.
"Father Jeff confessed his guilt and in doing so, there's no question about what he did," Roberts, now a news anchor for CNN in Atlanta, said quietly after yesterday's hearing. "No one can question it. It happened."