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Ex-priest is charged with abusing boys
By RICHARD DANIELSON and MEGAN SCOTT
Gerry Appleby, 68, was arrested Tuesday night at a home in San Marcos, Texas, a college town northeast of San Antonio. He was charged with two counts of capital sexual battery. Appleby, a Texas resident since 1993, was assistant pastor at St. Ignatius of Antioch Catholic Church in Tarpon Springs in the late 1970s, when the abuse took place, detectives say. "We were notified by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office that they had a warrant for his arrest," said Sgt. Allen Bridges of the Hays County Sheriff's Office. "The arrest was made without incident." Appleby, who was stripped of his collar by the Vatican in 1995, was living as a retiree and not practicing as a priest in Texas, Bridges said. Pinellas sheriff's detectives opened the investigation last May after a former altar boy reported that he had been sexually abused by a priest in the late 1970s at St. Ignatius. The former altar boy, who was 34 and living in Pasco County when he came forward, told investigators that Appleby repeatedly molested him and his twin brother when they were 11. The allegations were similar to those made in a 1996 lawsuit in which a plaintiff, a former St. Ignatius altar boy identified only by the initials R.S.B., contended that Appleby had assaulted him and his twin brother when they were 11. That suit was dropped. Pinellas sheriff's Detective Lee Miller interviewed Appleby in Texas in September, sheriff's spokesman Det. Tim Goodman said. The results of the sheriff's investigation were forwarded to the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office. "It's not unusual for something like that to take a year to a year and a half (to investigate) sometimes," Goodman said. A spokeswoman for the Diocese of St. Petersburg said she had not heard of Appleby's arrest until a reporter told her of it Thursday night. She said the diocese had "completely and fully cooperated" with detectives. She said Appleby was never a priest of the diocese, but belonged to a separate religious order -- the Missionaries of the Holy Family. "He was not a diocesan priest; he was a visiting priest on assignment," diocese spokeswoman Mary Jo Murphy said. "The people who are responsible for him would be his order." An official with the Missionaries of the Holy Family could not be reached Thursday night. In the past, the Diocese of St. Petersburg has said that Appleby left the diocese in 1979 after working in this area for 15 to 20 months. The diocese also has said it received no complaints of sexual misconduct involving Appleby until 1994, when Appleby's accuser complained to the diocese. Appleby's religious order, the Missionaries of the Holy Family, paid Appleby's accuser $4,800 for therapy in 1995. At that time, the religious order said Appleby had been removed from active ministry in 1990 and had been formally dismissed from the priesthood by the Vatican in March 1995. Appleby was being held Thursday at the Hays County Jail in Texas in lieu of $200,000 bail. Officials said he waived extradition and would be brought to Florida to face charges here.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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