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Women report abuse as kids

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published February 6, 2007

TAMPA - They were young girls when the alleged sexual abuse began. They confided in no one.

Now they were in their 40s. They thought their childhood abuser, a 66-year-old retired Air Force captain, was preying on another young female relative. They wanted him stopped.

So the two women told police their secret.

Just after 9 a.m. Monday, Tampa police arrested Glenn Edwin Mercer at a home he owns off West Shore Boulevard on eight counts of sexual battery on a child younger than 12.

Detective O.P. Parrish said the women first made their allegations three months ago in Hernando County, where Mercer's family moved from Tampa after he retired from the Air Force and a job in county government.

Authorities did not reveal the women's names, and the Times is withholding their relationship to Mercer to protect their identities.

Mercer, who once worked at MacDill Air Force Base, remained in jail Monday night. Calls to his Brooksville home were not returned. Dogs barked, but no one answered the door at his tidy flag-draped property, 4707 W Alline Ave., Tampa, where police arrested him.

Neither woman knew the other had been abused until they reconnected at a family gathering in 1996, Parrish said. They still stayed quiet - until they heard talk of Mercer abusing someone else.

One of the women, now 46, told authorities that Mercer began sexually abusing her in Nebraska when she was 5. At age 10, she moved to Tampa, and the abuse continued, Parrish said.

The other woman, now 43, said she was 8 when Mercer first abused her at his home. The abuse followed into her teens, she said

[Last modified February 6, 2007, 00:31:32]