AUSTRALIA
Echo Netdaily
The former head of the Marist brothers in Australia has denied he made a hasty decision to put a prolific child sex abuser on a plane to Canada three days after it became known police were investigating him.
Brother Gregory Sutton subsequently pleaded guilty to abusing children in schools in NSW, Qld and the ACT and had taught at Trinity Catholic College in Lismore.
Although he knew Brother Sutton had confessed to molesting a boy who later committed suicide, Brother Alexis Turton, the order’s provincial in 1989, thought it best to get him therapy at a Canadian centre for priest sex offenders.
Br Turton denied repeatedly at a child sex abuse royal commission hearing in Canberra on Wednesday that he sent Sutton to the Southdown centre near Toronto because police had begun asking questions.
Sutton was extradited from Canada and jailed for 12 years in 1996 after pleading guilty to multiple charges of assaulting school children from 1975 to 1986.
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