Mom of Alleged Sex Assault Victim Suing Pastor for Failing to Protect Girls from Ex-music Director

By David Jackson and Gary Marx
Chicago Tribune
October 20, 2013

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-south-austin-choir-director-20131020,0,2777940.story

One after another, teenage girls or their mothers approached their prominent West Side minister and accused the music director at his rapidly growing church of rape and molestation.

Instead of alerting police, Apostle John Abercrombie in three instances confronted the frightened girls in his church office with the music director present, according to interviews with the alleged victims and their families, as well as police reports and other government documents obtained by the Tribune.

In 2009, a church member brought Abercrombie a recorded cellphone conversation in which the 40-year-old music director, David Gardner, allegedly invited her 15-year-old daughter on a shopping trip to New York and told the girl not to tell her family.

Only then — a decade after the first girl came forward — did Abercrombie call police, records and interviews show.

Abercrombie acknowledged to detectives that "numerous allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of Gardner against numerous female minors had been reported to him," a 2009 Chicago police report obtained by the Tribune states. "Abercrombie provided the reporting detective with information needed to initiate investigations into each allegation."