Accused Priest's Fate Now in Hands of Jury
By Jeremy Roebuck
He ate two cookies - light vanilla coating with cream filling - drank a Dr Pepper, and counted to himself as the Rev. Andrew McCormick unfastened the 33 buttons on his cassock one by one. A 27-year-old man recounted that vivid memory from the witness stand this week, describing the moments before McCormick allegedly sexually assaulted him about 18 years ago. And as jurors began deliberating the suspended priest's fate Friday, their decision could come down to what those very specific recollections suggest about the accuser's story. For Trevan Borum, McCormick's lawyer, the accuser's ability to describe that moment "like a slow-motion Technicolor movie" nearly two decades after the alleged assault was too neat to be believed. The man "describes the rectory like he was the one who designed it," Borum told jurors during closing arguments Friday. "That's not how a child remembers things," he said. "Memory doesn't work like that." Prosecutor Kristen Kemp offered a different explanation. McCormick's accuser, a 10-year-old altar boy when the purported assault occurred, was so traumatized by what was happening, she said, that he focused his attention on anything else as a distraction. "What matters is what he experienced, what he felt - that breathing, that belly pushing him down on the bed," she said. McCormick, 59, is accused of luring the boy in 1997 to his bedroom in the rectory of St. John Cantius Church in Bridesburg, undressing him, and attempting to force him to perform oral sex. Throughout the five-day trial, Kemp guided witnesses through grueling testimony in an attempt to corroborate what essentially boils down to a he-said, he-said story. The accuser's parents described for jurors their son's drug abuse and multiple suicide attempts in the years after the alleged assault. Adam Visconto, a St. John Cantius altar boy in the late '90s, testified that he, too, thought McCormick crossed boundaries in their relationship. When his mother told McCormick to stay away, the priest left letters and gifts outside his house, Visconto said. McCormick, a balding man in spectacles, offered no reaction as the jury left to begin deliberations Friday. Then again, he had been through this before. A trial last year ended with a hung jury after 29 hours of deliberations. Unlike his last trial, though, McCormick did not testify this time. The jurors discussed the case for about an hour Friday and are set to resume deliberations on Monday. More than anything, Borum said Friday, McCormick would like to return to his old life. Ordained in 1982, McCormick was pastor of Sacred Heart parish near Bridgeport when he and 26 other Catholic priests were suspended in March 2011 by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for possible inappropriate conduct with children. A loyal group of his former parishioners - including two nuns - have stuck by him and attended every day of his trial. They said Friday that they welcomed McCormick's attention to the youth of his parish, whether taking altar boys on trips to the movies or tutoring them in Latin, or his constant availability to answer questions about their faith. "You spend 30 years building good character, and it can be taken from you in an instant" by one accusation, Borum said Friday. "That's just not right." [t http:]
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.