PENNSYLVANIA
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Catholic brother who taught at North Catholic faces sentencing in Australia for sexual assaults
July 10, 2015
By Peter Smith / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Before he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1986 for an 11-year teaching stint among unsuspecting youths, an American Roman Catholic religious brother left a trail of devastated young lives in Australia, a Melbourne court heard at a presentencing hearing this week following his sexual abuse conviction.
Victoria County Court heard victim-impact statements and other testimony Wednesday in the case of Brother Bernard Hartman, a member of the St. Louis-based Marianist Province of the United States.
He faces sentencing July 24 for his convictions this spring of sexually assaulting two girls and a boy during the 1970s and early 1980s, when he taught at a boy’s Catholic high school in suburban Melbourne. The boy was a student, and the girls were sisters of students.
“At the age of 50 I am unsure if I will ever gain what was taken from me in my childhood years,” Mairead Ashcroft of suburban Melbourne told the court.
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