QUEENS (NY)
Queens Courier/QNS
September 27, 2017
By Anthony Giudice
More than a dozen women have recently come forward alleging that a former priest and pastor of a Maspeth church sexually abused them during a nearly 20-year time period.
As first reported in the Daily News, the 15 women claim that Father Adam Prochaski, who served Holy Cross Church between 1969 and 1994 and taught at the now-defunct parish school, sexually abused them between the years of 1973 and 1994.
They’re being represented by attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represented sex abuse victims in Boston and was portrayed in the 2015 film “Spotlight” about the Boston Globe’s award-winning investigation into sexual abuse committed by clergymen.
Prochaski’s alleged victims were between the ages of 5 and 16 years old at the time of the alleged abuse, Garabedian told QNS in a conference call on Wednesday. It is further alleged that the sexual abuse took place inside the Holy Cross Church, in the rectory, in the school, in Prochaski’s car, and even inside the homes of some of the alleged victims.
“Where were the supervisors? Why weren’t they protecting the children?” Garabedian asked. “It is time for the Diocese of Brooklyn and Bishop [Nicholas] DiMarzio to step up to the plate and answer these questions.”
Linda Porcaro, a former teacher at Holy Cross who taught at the school from 1986 to 1991, was the first one at the school to take these allegations seriously after seven of Prochaski’s alleged victims alerted her to the abuse near the end of school year in 1990.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.