BishopAccountability.org
	Emotional Testimony Continues in Mercure Trial WNYT February 5, 2011 http://wnyt.com/article/stories/S1959737.shtml?cat=300 [with video] Testimony continued Friday in the trial of suspended Queensbury Priest Gary Mercure. Bloody underwear hidden 22 years ago was introduced in court to support charges of rape in Berkshire County. The bloody underwear doesn't rule Mercure in or out as the attacker. It certainly supports claims of trauma. But how did it stay around for 22 years before making its way to court? After five pairs of bloody underwear were identified by the alleged victim of Gary Mercure's rape 22 years before, the boy's mother described how it was found in a wall during a home remodeling in 1991. The Queensbury mother recognized the underwear as her son's and asked him about it. "I just felt he was very calm that day and I just went in there and I said, you know, sometimes bad things happen to little kids and it isn't ever their fault and I saw in his eyes something and he says nothing ever happened to me. I don't know what you're talking about so I couldn't say anything more to him." His mother did not believe there was no trauma but never asked again. But she did not throw out the garments. "They were my son's underwear. They were bloody all over. My baby was hurt bad. There were five of them so what I did was I put them on top of each other. I folded them and I put them in a bag and I went up over the garage and I put them in a garment bag and I kept them." The underwear stayed in a plastic bag within a bigger garment bag for 17 years until victims started reporting their attacks and her son started talking. "Why didn't you throw them out? Cause my little boy didn't throw them out. He hid them. I couldn't throw them out." Degraded DNAon the underwear does not implicate or clear Mercure of the alleged attacks. After the mother's dramatic testimony, a parade of other former altar boys took the stand to testify to hundreds, maybe thousands of attacks by Mercure in and around the Queensbury church during the 1980's. Although alleged in a different state, the testimony is being allowed to show a pattern of abuse.
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