Trial Date Set in Colorado for Former Local Youth Pastor
By Beth Smith
A trial date has been scheduled in Colorado for a former youth pastor who is facing sexual abuse charges both there and in Henderson. John Holland Brothers Jr., 44, who was employed here at Hyland Baptist Church, is expected to go to trial on Jan. 21 in Colorado District Court on 16 felony counts of sexual assault on a child and one count that is a sentence enhancer, according to Chief Deputy District Attorney Rusty Prindle in Routt County, Colo. If convicted of the sentence enhancing charge, that means a judge is required to make the sentence more severe, Prindle said. Brothers — who is being held on a $500,000 bond in a Colorado jail — faces two counts of first-degree sexual abuse in Henderson. A pretrial conference is scheduled here on Sept. 9. Due to legal issues, it’s taken more than a year to get a trial date in the Colorado case. Prindle said Brothers’ attorneys have been trying to get the victim and his father to testify at the preliminary hearing, and prosecutors have been fighting this, taking the matter to the Colorado Supreme Court. “We don’t like to have the victim testify because it’s traumatic,” he said Tuesday in a phone interview. “We felt like the defense shouldn’t either. The defense filed to have the child testify and we disagreed with that and filed a motion to stop the proceedings.” “It took a year. It took longer than expected,” he said, adding that the supreme court didn’t rule for or against the victim testifying but said the county court judge would have to decide. The county court judge made the decision that the boy and his father shouldn’t testify at the preliminary hearing, which occurred on Friday, Aug. 2 and lasted several hours, he said. At an arraignment on Monday, Aug. 5, Brothers entered a not guilty plea to the felony charges against him. According to a newspaper article from the Steamboat Pilot & Today, Routt County Sheriff’s Detective T.J. Sisto, the primary investigator on the case, testified during the preliminary hearing that Brothers forced himself on the Colorado victim and sexually assaulted him eight times in a bedroom over a six-week period. The boy tried to fight back, the detective said. While living in Colorado, Brothers was a pastor at First Baptist Church in Yampa and a teacher at Heritage Christian School west of Steamboat Springs between 2006 and 2008. He was hired to teach junior high and high school science, high school math and Bible classes, the Steamboat Pilot article said. After leaving Steamboat Springs, Colo., Brothers moved to Henderson in 2008 and spent roughly three years as a youth pastor at Hyland Baptist Church. Then in the fall of 2011, Henderson police said Brothers was confronted by church deacons regarding sexual abuse allegations from two members of the youth group. Brothers left Henderson, moving to West Monroe, La., to live with relatives. When he returned to Henderson in November of 2011 to collect his belongings from his house on Jihan Court, authorities arrested him on the local charges. After bonding out of jail, Brothers returned to Louisiana where he was arrested in April of 2012 on the warrants from Colorado.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.