CINCINNATI (OH)
WXIX - Fox19 [Cincinnati OH]
December 19, 2024
By Jennifer Edwards Baker
Ohio lawmakers are reforming child sex abuse laws as a result of the case of Geoff Drew, who was a priest for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati when he was convicted three years ago this month of raping a 10-year-old altar boy.
Drew, now 62 and no longer a priest, was suspected of sexually grooming young boys for years in Hamilton, Butler and Montgomery counties, court and police records show, before he pleaded guilty three years ago this month to nine counts of rape decades ago.
Prosecutors, however, couldn’t charge him until his rape victim came forward in 2019 because grooming is not a criminal offense in Ohio.
It will be soon. Gov. Mike DeWine is expected to sign House Bill 322 into law, making Ohio the sixth state in the nation to criminalize grooming of a child for sexual abuse.
The measure unanimously passed the Ohio Senate on Thursday, eight months after House lawmakers approved it.
Two Republican House lawmakers from Hamilton County, Bill Seitz and Cindy Abrams, co-sponsored House Bill 322.
“With the growth in technology, our children are more accessible than ever before, when you are able to prove a predator is manipulating a child for the purpose of abuse, law enforcement should have the ability to act. This law does that,” Rebecca Surendorff, co-founder of Ohioans for Child Protection, said Wednesday.
Surendorff and other child advocates testified in support of the bill.
Seitz has said he was prompted to act when parents clamored for reforms in light of the Drew case.
“This bill takes three steps forward in our ongoing efforts to stop child sexual abuse, most notably the creation of a new criminal offense against grooming children through a pattern of inappropriate touching or communication designed to entice them into having sex,” Seitz told FOX19 in April when it passed the House.
“That part of the bill is due to advocacy efforts by parents in Hamilton and Butler counties. We based our grooming law on one from Indiana. ”
Surendorff and other members of Ohioans for Child Protection have repeatedly credited and cited FOX19 NOW’s reporting on the Archdiocese of Cincinnati priests, especially Drew, with getting the attention of lawmakers and the public, including our exclusive interview with his rape victim in 2022.
“I linked your reporting about the Drew case to my testimony for the grooming bill hearing tomorrow. It will be part of the public record on the bill,” Surendorff told FOX19 NOW on Dec. 3.
Surendorff’s children attended the school at St. Ignatius of Loyola in Green Township when then-Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters announced Drew raped one of the students multiple times at St. Jude School, also in Green Township, 30 years prior and was being charged.
The victim came forward as a man in his 40s during the summer of 2019 and told authorities that the abuse occurred in Drew’s school office after school hours.
At the time of the crimes, Drew was St. Jude’s music minister. He did not become a priest until 2004 and also taught at Elder High School in West Price Hill.
Court records show there were several complaints and allegations about Drew’s behavior for years, information Hamilton County prosecutors planned to expose in detail during his trial.
If Drew’s case had not ended in the plea, archdiocese officials might have been compelled to testify under oath about what they knew about him and when.
There were other alleged victims, including another student at St. Jude, who was 12 or younger when Drew began grooming and then sexually assaulting between 1985 and 1987, prosecutors wrote in court records filed in 2020.
Drew, however, was not charged in connection with those allegations due to the statute of limitations.
Prosecutors also planned to call several witnesses to testify to “Drew’s Grooming Actions of Boys from Same Time Period” as the altar boy’s alleged sexual abuse, according to a court motion filed in the case.
“The State expects to offer the testimony of several witnesses who will testify that on multiple occasions, they saw Drew inappropriately touching young boys who were the same gender as (the altar boy) and who were around the same age as (him,)” the motion states.
Prosecutors wrote in court records they also planned to call witnesses who would be able to testify to Drew’s “Grooming Actions of Boys in More Recent Times.”
“The State has found multiple witnesses who can testify that Drew’s grooming behavior with minor boys continued on. This evidence is offered to show knowledge of grooming (the altar boy) and the absence of mistake or accident regarding the touching of (him). Drew’s modus operandi, his grooming behavior, had not changed one bit,” reads the court motion.
Drew served as pastor from 2009-2018 at St. Maximilian Kolbe in Liberty Township, where parishioners raised concerns to the archdiocese in 2013 and 2015, according to a 2019 news release from the archdiocese.
The concerns included “uninvited bear hugs, shoulder massages, patting of the leg above the knee and inappropriate sexual comments about one’s body or appearance, directed at teenage boys,” the release states.
The Butler County Prosecutor’s Office and county children’s services looked into the complaints, but Prosecutor Mike Gmoser has told FOX19 NOW there was no evidence of criminal behavior.
The Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office also had a similar case with the same outcome.
Gmoser has said he was so troubled by Drew’s behavior that he warned the archdiocese’s chancellor to keep Drew away from children and to monitor him because he felt Drew was “sexually grooming” boys for future use.
An archdiocese spokeswoman has said the chancellor conveyed Gmoser’s concern to its second-ranking bishop, Joseph Binzer, who oversaw priest personnel matters at the time.
In 2018, however, Drew requested and received permission from the archdiocese to be moved to another church, St Ignatius.
That church has Cincinnati’s largest Catholic grade school with more than 1,000 students.
The archdiocese has said Drew was permitted to move there from St. Max because he wanted to be closer to his mother. He was not moved because of complaints from St. Max parishioners about him.
The archdiocese, however, suspended Drew as pastor at St. Ignatius in 2019 after the parents of a teenage boy complained that Drew sent him text messages.
The messages were not sexual in nature, church officials said at the time, but this violated their child protection rules.
Parishioners at St. Ignatius were upset because they were not told about previous complaints against Drew while he was at St. Maximilian.
Shortly before Drew was placed on administrative leave, his rape victim came forward to a Cincinnati police detective.
The archdiocese has come under much criticism for its handling of misconduct complaints against Drew and conceded in 2019 that it made “serious mistakes” in its response to concerns about his behavior for years.
The archdiocese has said it made several changes and removed Binzer from overseeing priest personnel matters, saying he failed to report a 2013 accusation that Drew behaved improperly with children to Archbishop Dennis Schnurr and the Priest’s Personnel Board.
Binzer would ultimately resign in the fallout over Drew, but remains a priest with the title “Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus.”
The archdiocese has said it made new policies and updated others. Some of the changes include appointing two people with human resources backgrounds who are not clergy to advise a board that oversees priests.
They’ve also stopped priests from working while they are being “monitored” for potential behavioral issues and created an ethics review team to help track allegations of misconduct.”
After Drew’s sentencing, the archdiocese released a statement that he would be “laicized” and reiterated its commitment to enforcing its Decree on Child Protection.
“Since the Decree on Child Abuse was first implemented in 1993, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati has reported all allegations of sexual abuse of a minor involving Church personnel (bishops, priests, deacons, lay employees and volunteers) to the civil authorities, regardless of when the abuse occurred and regardless of whether the accused person is living or in ministry,” the archdiocese’s website states.
It now shows Drew as “laicized.”
“When a cleric is laicized (permanently dismissed from the clerical state) in accord with canon law at the direction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, he is no longer incardinated and is unable to function as a priest anywhere,” the website states.
Drew will be released from prison in 2026 due to credit for time served at the county jail while awaiting trial, 27 months.
Once he’s out, he will be required to register as a Tier III sex offender for the rest of his life.