MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio
Madeleine Baran St. Paul, Minn. Dec 1, 2014
For the past year, Shirley Ruff couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with the former Catholic priest who volunteered with her at a Brooklyn Center food shelf.
Thomas Ericksen claimed not to have a driver’s license, she said. He said he was upset by toddlers “posing” in sexual ways, she said, while their parents picked up groceries at the office of Community Emergency Assistance Programs. He seemed preoccupied by the clergy sex abuse scandal, she said, which he blamed on the requirement of celibacy.
Ruff, 65, felt guilty for being suspicious. She had never seen Ericksen do anything illegal.
Then one night in September she went online and typed his name into Google. Her stomach turned.
Ericksen, 67, had been accused of sexually abusing boys in the early 1980s while serving as a priest of the Diocese of Superior, Wis. The diocese had agreed to a settlement of nearly $3 million with at least two alleged victims in 1989, according to news reports, and Ericksen had left the priesthood.
But he continued to have access to children. In 2010, he was fired from a volunteer job at the Special Olympics in Missouri when the nonprofit learned of the allegations against him. That same year, law enforcement officials in Wisconsin had opened up a criminal investigation into the alleged abuse, and Ericksen abruptly moved to Indonesia. Before he left, he admitted to a reporter that he had “fondled” three boys. Now he was back in the country, and the criminal investigation was still open.
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