MAINE
Sun Journal
Nok-Noi Ricker, Bangor Daily News
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
BANGOR — In the years before his suicide in November, several people questioned the Rev. Robert Carlson’s behavior toward young boys, but no one took action.
That is the thrust of a 104-page Maine State Police investigative report on Carlson, a longtime religious and civic leader who jumped to his death from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge after learning detectives were looking into allegations of child sex abuse involving him.
“There clearly were victims of sexual abuse that indicated that Bob Carlson was their abuser,” Lt. Christopher Coleman, commander of the Maine State Police’s Major Crimes Unit for the northern part of the state, said Wednesday. “It appears that it occurred over many years and it caused a lot of trauma to many people.”
There is no summary in the report, which was released Wednesday, but it includes interviews with people who said they were sexually abused by Carlson. The former president of Husson University, a Penobscot County sheriff’s deputy, a Bangor police officer and a therapist who treated some of Carlson’s victims also were interviewed. They said they had either received information about or witnessed Carlson engage in criminal or sexual behavior over the last four decades.
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