Ex-student describes sexual abuse on trip to Lake Viking with KC area priest

A former student at Nativity of Mary School in Independence told jurors Thursday that he and a friend endured sexual abuse on a weekend excursion with Monsignor Thomas O’Brien in 1983.

When the boys got home and told their parents, one father reported it to the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City St.-Joseph and met with then-Bishop John J. Sullivan, according to testimony presented to the Jackson County jury. But those families had no idea at the time that the priest who groped the boys and stripped naked on a bed in front of them had been reported to the diocese multiple times over the previous 20 years.

“To this day,” attorney Pedro Irigonegaray asked Darren Wahwassuck, “has a single representative of the Catholic diocese contacted you to say, ‘I’m sorry’?”

“No, sir,” Wahwassuck replied.

Jurors heard the fourth day of testimony in a civil trial involving Jon David Couzens, a former altar boy who says O’Brien sexually abused him in the early 1980s. Couzens claims the diocese was told repeatedly that O’Brien was a danger to children but failed to prevent the abuse.

The diocese contends that no credible evidence exists to prove those allegations and argues that Couzens’ claims of repressed memory are invalid. O’Brien, who has been the subject of dozens of sexual abuse lawsuits, died last year at 87.

Five witnesses testified Thursday, including a former Nativity teacher and a clinical psychologist who evaluated Couzens.

Tom Caffrey Sr. told jurors that his son, Tom Jr., was the friend who went to Lake Viking with Wahwassuck. He said when his son told him that O’Brien had molested them, he reported it and was summoned to a meeting with Sullivan. At the meeting, Caffrey Sr. said, no one told him that the diocese had received numerous complaints for two decades about O’Brien and his troubling behavior with boys.

The diocese removed O’Brien from his assignment as pastor of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish in October 1983 and sent him for psychological evaluation and treatment in New Mexico and Washington, D.C. O’Brien returned to the diocese in June 1984 and was allowed to serve only as a part-time hospital chaplain, the diocese has said. He continued in that position until April 2002, when then-Bishop Raymond J. Boland told O’Brien that he no longer could present himself as a priest or celebrate Mass.

Wahwassuck said he and the younger Tom Caffrey were in eighth grade when O’Brien invited them to spend the weekend at his home on Lake Viking. The boys were to do some yardwork and other chores, then they could go swimming and hang out.

About dusk, the two decided to go skinny-dipping — “just being stupid boys,” Wahwassuck said. While they were in the water, he said, O’Brien called them over one at a time and groped them. Later, in the house, O’Brien offered them dirty magazines and alcohol, Wahwassuck said, and as the night progressed, asked them to rub suntan lotion on his sunburned body. O’Brien told them they could remove his underwear, and when they didn’t, he removed it himself. Then he said something so vulgar that Wahwassuck, voice shaking, apologized to the jurors for having to hear it.

The boys were afraid to go to bed that night, Wahwassuck said.

“We stayed awake all night,” he said, as spectators in the courtroom dabbed tears from their eyes. “We were all that was there to protect each other.

“I would say it was probably as pretty close to hell as you could get.”

This story was originally published October 2, 2014 at 7:15 PM with the headline "Ex-student describes sexual abuse on trip to Lake Viking with KC area priest."