PENNSYLVANIA
PennLive
[with copy of the letter]
By Ivey DeJesus | idejesus@pennlive.com
The letter is dated Sept. 25, 2002.
It was written by an attorney whose clients, all of them victims of sexual molestation and rape at the hands of priests from the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, were seeking some form of redress – either criminal charges or at the very least an investigation into their allegations.
The letter was addressed to three law enforcement officials: Cambria County District Attorney David Tulowitzki, who today is a county judge; Karen Arnold, then-assistant district attorney in Centre County; and Catherine Miller, then-assistant district attorney in Blair County.
The four-page letter detailed accounts from young men who said they had been molested or abused by six parish priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese — some over the span of years. One young man was nine years old and serving as an altar boy at Holy Name Church in Ebensburg when Monsignor Francis McCaa began to molest him. The abuse lasted four years.
Richard Serbin, the attorney who wrote the letter to those three officials, never heard back from them.
Now, 14 years later, a grand jury investigation has found that the preponderance of law enforcement authorities to pass on allegations of clergy sex abuse further enabled more than 50 priests to molest hundreds of children over four decades across the diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.
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