By Michael O'Keeffe
New York Daily News
December 3, 2010
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/high_school/2010/12/02/2010-12-02_ernest_lorch_founder_of_riverside_church_hoops_program_faces_extradition_delay_i.html
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| Famed local hoops guru Ernest Lorch is accused of assaulting and attempting to rape a 17-year-old boy in the late 1970s. |
Ernest Lorch, the founder of the famed Riverside Church basketball program who failed to show up at a Massachusetts court at an Oct. 27 arraignment on sex abuse charges, is scheduled to appear in state court in White Plains on Friday for an extradition hearing.
The hearing will likely be adjourned until early January because Gov. Paterson has yet to sign the governor's warrant requesting Lorch's extradition to Massachusetts.
Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the Westchester district attorney's office, said the hold up is simply an administrative delay and that Paterson is expected to sign the warrant soon.
Lorch was indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury last month on two sex-abuse charges. A judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest after he failed to appear for his October arraignment in Northampton District Court.
Lorch is accused of assaulting and attempting to rape a 17-year-old boy during a trip to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the late 1970s. The alleged victim, now 50, contacted authorities in Massachusetts earlier this year.
Lorch's attorney Frederick Cohn said his client is in failing health and wheelchair-bound, and he will challenge extradition because the Massachusetts indictment is flawed and vague. The indictment says the assault took place between March 1977 and April 1978.
Cohn has said that while Lorch has acknowledged using a paddle to discipline players, he is guilty only of administering corporal punishment, not sexual abuse.
As the Daily News first reported in 2002, the Manhattan District Attorney's office investigated Lorch after a former Riverside player named Robert Holmes complained about sexual abuse. Prosecutors then faced statute of limitations issues and did not file charges against Lorch.
Massachusetts officials, however, did not face statute of limitations hurdles, since the statute of limitations clock there stops ticking when a suspect leaves the state.
Lorch founded the Riverside Church Hawks basketball program in the 1960s as an outreach group for underprivileged kids who lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the Morningside Heights religious institution. It evolved into one of the nation's top basketball programs.
Lorch is the second prominent New York basketball figure to be indicted on sex abuse charges by a Massachusetts grand jury this year. Bob Oliva, the former Christ the King Regional High School boys coach, pleaded not guilty to two charges of rape of a child at an arraignment in Boston in April.
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