By Erik Loney
KXLY
April 2, 2008
http://www.kxly.com/global/story.asp?s=8103639
[with video]
SPOKANE -- Confessed child molester and former Spokane priest Patrick O'Donnell is talking about new legal troubles after a woman placed a restraining order against him.
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A woman that lives in O'Donnell's gated neighborhood in LaConner, Wash. filed a temporary harassment protection order against him last week, claiming he approached her twin daughters while they were at the neighborhood school bus stop.
O'Donnell is accused of picking up a rock off the ground, approaching the girls and giving it to them. Neighbors say they witnessed the interaction and chased O'Donnell away.
After the incident, the girls' mother Tammy Henricksen was granted a restraining order by a Skagit County judge. It orders O'Donnell to stay 100 feet away from a school bus stop and two twin girls, or he would be arrested.
"It is a plain and simple case of mistaken identity," John G. Bergmann, O'Donnell's attorney, wrote in an e-mail response to an inquiry about the restraining order. "We have identified the person who was involved with the rock incident described in the petition. It is not Mr. O'Donnell."
"It was another resident of Shelter Bay," Bergmann added in a follow-on response.
"Some other man was accosted by a parent, and I have nothing to do with it," O'Donnell told a Seattle television reporter at his home Tuesday night.
When asked if parents should be worried about their children's safety, he answered, "Absolutely not."
Patrick O'Donnell previously confessed in taped depositions to molesting more than 20 boys while a priest in the Spokane Catholic Diocese during the 1970s and 1980s. He claimed he stopped molesting children in the 1980s.
"This man should be in prison for life for all he's admitted to, but he hasn't served a day because the statute of limitations has run out," Henricksen said.
Since he was never charged with a crime, despite his confessions, he does not have to register as a sex offender.
A court hearing is scheduled for Monday in Mt. Vernon during which O'Donnell will defend himself against the protection order lifted.
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