VIRGINIA
Richmond Times-Dispatch
BY MARK BOWES
Richmond Times-Dispatch
A once-popular youth minister for the now-defunct Trinity Assembly of God in Chesterfield County pleaded no contest Monday to taking indecent liberties with two teenage female parishioners in the 1990s after gaining their trust and affection as a father figure and spiritual counselor.
The years-long sexual abuse began when both girls were just 14, and Troy A. Mitten, now 53, was an engaging youth minister who a former pastor told authorities “seemed to reach out to the young ladies who had no father figure” in their lives, according to a prosecutor’s summary of evidence in Chesterfield Circuit Court.
The victims, now 32 and 35, only recently came forward to police, and one of them was so attached to Mitten and his family that she initially destroyed evidence and helped him develop a defense involving the other victim.
But on the eve of Mitten’s scheduled trial last year, the woman emailed Chesterfield prosecutor B.J. McGee to talk and later told a detective that Mitten had, in fact, also molested her.
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