CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Tribune
November 02, 2012|By Joe Mahr, Chicago Tribune reporter
In a grand ceremony in front of the future first lady, veteran Chicago teacher Harold “Jerry” Mash was lauded for tirelessly working to help his students — a stark contrast to how he was labeled in an Ohio courtroom three decades earlier.
On that drizzly day back in 1976, Mash was found guilty of one of the cardinal sins of the classroom: abuse of a child. He lost his job. He said he was leaving teaching.
But by 2005, he had reinvented himself two states and 200 miles away. He was a guest of honor at that Chicago reception held under the skylights in a special atrium atop the Harold Washington Library. Michelle Obama gave the keynote speech. Mash was among six teachers given $5,000 awards. …
It was that high-profile case, Tremp said, that led him and his wife, Julie, to worry whether Mash still had access to children. They discovered a man by the same name as a teacher in Chicago schools and began digging for records. They contacted an advocacy group, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which agreed to help even though Mash was never a priest.
The Tremps also contacted the Tribune, which separately sought records across three states — leading to the unearthing of the 1976 case file and its victim.
The advocacy group’s president, Barbara Blaine, said that Mash forfeited any right to be in a classroom after what happened in the 1970s, even if it’s more than three decades later.
“I believe he may have served his sentence,” Blaine said, “and maybe he wouldn’t abuse anyone, but why risk it?”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.