BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun [Baltimore MD]
May 31, 2024
By Cassidy Jensen
Erin Maze and Shannon Conway are no longer the children who walked the halls of St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School in their Catholic school uniforms two decades ago.
Maze, 32, is an outgoing lawyer and parent who talks quickly and laughs easily. Her shyer friend Conway, 31, works in political science and has a skill for diligent research.
Both women still live in Baltimore, not far from where they grew up. They share love for their respective cats, grief for a mutual friend who was killed years ago and complicated memories of the now-closed Hampden school where they were students of David A. Czajkowski, a lay teacher convicted of sexually abusing students.
Maze and Conway are speaking out publicly for the first time about their experiences. The women submitted claims before Friday’s deadline in the bankruptcy case of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, which does not include Czajkowski on its list of credibly accused priests and lay teachers.
“Despite them adding lay teachers, and despite him being convicted, he is not on that list,” Conway said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. “And I don’t know why.”
Although a law that took effect in October made it possible for people to sue institutions for child abuse no matter when it happened, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy, funneling any claims against the church though that money-oriented process.
A Maryland attorney general’s 2023 report on decades of sex abuse in the archdiocese also did not list Czajkowski. His name is included in a statewide database The Sun published in December.
The women hope that by sharing their stories — including memories they have come to fully understand only recently — they can gain greater accountability for the harm they say shaped a generation of students. They also seek to enlighten parents about the subtle forms that child abuse and manipulation can take.
“I just want the truth, as much of it as I can get,” Conway said. “I don’t want this to happen to other people.”
Christian Kendzierski, an archdiocese spokesperson, said the archdiocese and its Independent Review Board, starting in 2002, has listed priests and brothers “because of the particularly important role they play in our churches.” The archdiocese, he said, publicizes credible allegations against lay employees in other ways, reports allegations against them to authorities and removes them from employment.
“The use of our list to highlight abuse by priests and brothers in no way minimizes the horrendous abuse committed by others,” Kendzierski wrote in an email to The Sun. “The Archdiocese has repeatedly spoken publicly about Czajkowski, calling his behavior ‘reprehensive’ and adding that his ‘subsequent conviction and prison sentence are the proper consequences for his actions.’”
A spokesperson said the attorney general’s office cannot comment on the inclusion or noninclusion of specific individuals in its report, but investigators still are reviewing information they received from survivors after the report’s release.
Czajkowski was charged with molesting 11 students and pleaded guilty in 2002 to three counts of sex abuse, receiving a five-year prison sentence. Each time a reporter visited the Baltimore County home that state real estate records say is his primary residence, the former teacher did not answer the door. Nor did Czajkowski, 60, respond to notes seeking comment.
The year Czajkowski was convicted, 2002, marked a turning point for the Catholic Church in the United States, as The Boston Globe revealed the scope of the cover-up of clergy sex abuse and church leadership put in place stronger reporting and prevention procedures.
But even as decades-old abuse came to light elsewhere, the alumni of St. Thomas in North Baltimore, now adults reaching their early 30s, suffered new and lasting trauma.
Multiple children reported abuse to school leaders before Czajkowski was fired, according to lawsuits brought by students’ families. In May 2002, a few months after the teacher’s arrest and in anticipation of new “zero-tolerance” policies, church officials asked the Rev. William Simms, who had admitted to previous abuse, to move out of the parish rectory that shared a campus with the school.
One afternoon earlier this year, Maze returned to the brick building near “The Avenue” in Hampden that once held the parish school of about 200 students. She pointed at the second-floor windows of the former school — the classroom where Czajkowski taught.
Simms lived in the home attached to the church, with windows overlooking the parking lot where children played at recess. Students were frequently sent to the rectory to run errands, Maze and Conway said.
Having been granted immunity from prosecution in the 1980s through an agreement with Anne Arundel County, Simms had been living in the rectory since 1992.
To the two women, Czajkowski’s abuse and Simms’ presence in their parish together showed a “breach of trust.”
“I feel disappointed that someone like him was also in our midst during our childhood,” Conway said of Simms. “It feels creepy. It feels avoidable.”
The survivors
Like many of the families of pupils at the now-shuttered school, Maze and Conway’s parents worked blue-collar jobs, proudly saving up to put their kids through Catholic school.
The Sun does not identify victims of sex abuse without their consent. Conway and Maze agreed to be named for this article. Baltimore-based Jenner Law represents them and three other victims of Czajkowski, attorney Elisha Hawk said.
The two girls were a grade level apart — Maze is a year older — but their families knew each other through Hampden’s close-knit Catholic community.
In an interview at the Jenner Law offices in January, Maze flipped through yearbooks from the late ’90s and early 2000s of smiling kids in uniforms, while Conway spoke with emotion about what she’s learned about Czajkowski and Simms.
In part because of the toll the abuse took on her, Maze never wanted biological children of her own, but now she’s raising her cousin’s 5-year-old. She grapples with how to protect her child without passing along the anxiety she feels.
“It makes me a bit of a crazy parent,” she admitted.
Similarly, Conway long struggled to trust men and worked hard to avoid a trap of relying on substances to cope. The two women grew closer in 2010, when their 19-year-old friend and classmate Patrick Dolan was killed in an attempted robbery
As the end of the attorney general’s four-year investigation into the archdiocese approached, they began to talk about their shared experiences in Czajkowski’s classes, including bizarre reenactments of “slave auctions,” which came with the physical “inspection” of student’s bodies.
“We were all suffering in silos, thinking the same thing, and 22 years later, you start calling friends and you’re hesitant,” Conway said. “You’re like, ‘Hey, I kind of want to talk to you about something,’ and what you realize is that no one forgets about it.”
Over the next 20 years, many in their 4th and 5th grade classes suffered lasting issues like substance abuse and early pregnancies, Conway and Maze said. Although such setbacks were impossible to trace to a single cause, both wonder if the abuse contributed.
Research shows that survivors of childhood sex abuse are more likely to suffer with mental health issues like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, and engage in risky sexual behaviors, self-harm and disordered eating. They also can be more prone to conditions like heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome and some cancers.
“Our childhood was destroyed,” Conway said. “Our innocence was gone, our trust in people. I think a lot of us were tormented for years.”
‘Abuse comes in all forms’
When Maze’s parents first asked her if Czajkowski touched her inappropriately, she told them that he tucked her shirt into her sweatpants once and adjusted her Peter Pan-style uniform collar.
However, different memories began to return years later in 2017, the year Maze was assaulted while working at a bar and Netflix released “The Keepers” documentary. It detailed abuse by A. Joseph Maskell, a priest at Seton Keogh High School in Southwest Baltimore.
She remembered that Czajkowski abused her at his home, Maze said, after her mom brought her to go swimming with the teacher and his son and left for about an hour.
Conway’s experience with Czajkowski was different, she said. A good student who didn’t make waves, she said she suffered mental abuse and grooming at St. Thomas. She sat in her teacher’s lap daily, as he whispered how special she was and how he loved her differently than other people, Conway said.
“What I want people to know is that abuse comes in all forms,” Conway said. “I think it’s important for people to ask your kids, ‘OK, when you’re around this teacher, what are your daily interactions like?’” Conway said. “’Does he ask you to keep secrets? How often? Does his body come into contact with yours? Does he have weird nicknames for you? Does he tell you that you can’t talk to certain friends?’”
At least seven families settled lawsuits against the archdiocese and Czajkowski in 2003, according to court records. Conway and Maze were not among them, although Conway said her family filed a claim for therapy costs a few years later.
The family of a 9-year-old girl who reported Czajkowski began molesting her in 2001 brought one lawsuit, which it settled for $110,000. Attorneys for the family wrote that two other 4th graders reported abuse to the principal months before the girl came forward.
The principal told one student in late 2001 that the teacher was on employee probation and that she “needn’t worry further,” according to the complaint.
The girl, now an adult, said in an interview with The Sun that the abuse’s impact sent her on a self-destructive path as a teen, including becoming pregnant at 15 by someone else.
She said that after improbably being named the honor roll in 4th grade, despite being mostly absent from school, she felt teachers treated her differently for missteps in 5th grade and middle school.
Maze and Conway said students whose families filed civil lawsuits were singled out by school staff over the next few years.
“I was always in trouble,” the woman said. “It was like there was an X on my back and they all just kind of would jump on me for everything.”
She said the staff appeared scared that she would speak about the abuse in class.
“They almost treated me like I was a liability,” she said. “If I opened my mouth to say anything and I was upset, they would send me out of the classroom.”
Seeing it in print
Last spring, Conway was optimistic. She expected to see Czajkowski’s name in the attorney general’s report, given his conviction. She hoped that the report, which covered six decades of abuse in much of Maryland, would bring information to light or at least affirm the experiences of those who didn’t want their pain to be forgotten.
“’Maybe this report will tell me something I don’t know, or will confirm what I do know, but it’ll be in print,’” Conway told herself.
Conway praised the investigation for the scope of abuse it captured, but she and Maze were disappointed they didn’t see Czajkowski’s name in the report.
“When it wasn’t,” Conway said, “I felt like I had to do all this research.” Without her ordeal reflected in the record, she felt like “a dog with a bone.”
She began filing public records requests, contacting reporters and researching information about Czajkowski. He’s not currently listed on Maryland’s sex offender registry, although his plea agreement required registration. That disturbs Conway, Maze and the woman who reported abuse as a 9-year-old.
At the time of his 2002 conviction, the maximum length of registration for many sex offenses was 10 years.
The archdiocese’s decision to file for bankruptcy last fall felt like another blow for Conway and Maze because the process barred further lawsuits against the archdiocese. Maze was frustrated when she thought she had lost the chance to testify against Czajkowski and saw the bankruptcy as a silencing “brick wall.”
“We both felt so many doors slamming in our face, so many shutdowns,” Maze said. “The first one was, of course, him not being in the report.”
Still, Conway said, if telling her story publicly means another former student or someone with a similar experience feels seen, it would have been worth bringing up the painful memories.
“If one person reads this, whether they were in our class or somewhere across the city in another school and they identify with it, I think that that’s enough,” she said. “Nobody should feel alone in this.”