Bruce Jacques Pleaded Guilty to Sex Act with Teenage Boy
News Times
October 19, 2006
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1018217
New York (AP) -- A fired high school administrator and defrocked New Milford, Conn., priest who molested an emotionally disturbed teenage student in Central Park was sentenced Wednesday to one to three years in prison.
State Supreme Court Justice Rena Uviller sentenced Bruce Jacques, 57, on his guilty plea last month to two counts of third-degree criminal sex act, calling him "an exploiter and victimizer of the weak."
Jacques, captured in April after being on the run for months in places as distant as Malaysia, admitted that he performed a sex act on the 16-year-old boy, first in his Manhattan school and hours later in Central Park.
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| Bruce Jacques |
Jacques was dismissed as an Episcopal priest in New Milford for propositioning a 13-year-old boy, said Assistant District Attorney Kerry O'Connell.
O'Connell said she spoke to several people who were molested by Jacques in Connecticut, but it was too late to prosecute those cases.
Jacques, a former rector at St. John's Episcopal Church, resigned from the church in 1995 after charges became public that he allegedly sexually propositioned a 13-year-old Kent boy with oral sex as a confirmation gift in 1994. Jacques, the divorced father of two, had been at the church since 1984.
The New York victim, a Robert Louis Stevenson School student, was abused on Oct. 20, 2005.
O'Connell said the victim told a teacher what was going on. The teacher followed Jacques and the boy, but lost them in the park.
When Jacques returned, the teacher and the headmaster confronted him and "he was summarily fired," O'Connell said. By the time police were called, Jacques had fled.
The prosecutor said Jacques was returned to New York after being caught trying to sneak into the United States from British Columbia. She said police learned he had been to Malaysia by tracking his cell phone calls.
O'Connell told the judge Wednesday that Jacques had spent most of his life preying on teenage boys, and at Stevenson he spotted a victim in "a sweet and vulnerable youth who had found comfort and refuge at that school."
Defense lawyer Richard Charney said he would seek protective custody for his client.
"I don't know what kind of experience he will have in prison," O'Connell said, "but it will not come close to the pain he has caused his young victim."
Had Jacques been convicted at trial, he faced a sentence of two and two-thirds to eight years in prison. Uviller said she accepted the relatively light plea deal sentence to spare the victim from testifying.
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