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Sex abuse statute of limitations considered by Mo. Supreme Court

By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER
Associated Press Writer

Saturday, March 29, 2008

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A former Catholic school student in suburban St. Louis should have quickly realized that a Marianist brother’s back-room “experiments” on the boy were a form of sexual abuse, an attorney for the religious order argued Thursday before the Missouri Supreme Court.

Robert Visnaw, a former student at St. John Vianney High School in Kirkwood, sued William Mueller in 2006, more than two decades after the alleged abuse occurred.

Visnaw argued that he didn’t remember any sexual acts until a year before filing suit. The religious order countered that Mueller’s alleged behavior — which reportedly included blindfolding Visnaw and stripping the teen to his underwear while holding a knife to his throat — were clearly sexual in nature.

The timing is crucial because the state’s deadline for filing lawsuits is triggered not by when a wrong action is committed but by when victims are capable of realizing the damage they suffered.

Gerard Noce, an attorney for the Marianist Province, told the court’s seven judges that Visnaw should have sued before April 1993, five years after his 21st birthday. He pointed out that Visnaw acknowledged soon after the encounter with Mueller that the teacher also rubbed gel in his hair and warned Visnaw not to tell his parents.

“By any objective standard, he had (prior) knowledge” that the acts were sexual, Noce said.

Mueller, 71, first taught at Vianney in the early 1960s. He returned to the school two decades later, after reports of improper conduct with male students at Marianist schools in Colorado and Texas led to a stint at a church treatment center in New Mexico that specializes in working with sexual abusers.

Twenty-four men have sued the Pueblo, Colo., Roman Catholic Diocese and the religious order, which is based in St. Louis, for alleged abuse by Mueller dating back more than four decades. Sixteen other accusers in Missouri and Texas claim in either police reports or lawsuits that Mueller molested them.

In October, a 37-year-old Kirkwood man received a $160,000 settlement from the religious order for a suit that claimed abuse by Mueller in 1985, when the man was a 15-year-old sophomore at Vianney. Mueller was the school’s assistant principal and dean of students.

The suit claimed that Mueller asked the boy to help with a secret experiment toward earning his master’s degree. Mueller then closed and locked the door, blindfolded the student and held a long, sharp object against his throat while simulating sexual intercourse with the teen.

Daniel Craig, Visnaw’s attorney, argued that Mueller’s position of authority and the apparent knowledge of his conduct by the religious leader’s superiors gave the bizarre behavior a veil of legitimacy.

“Over a 30-year period, this gentleman perfected this mousetrap,” he said. “All this conduct that (my client) has always remembered ... was in the context of a legitimate psychological experiment.”

Visnaw has said he realized the true nature of Mueller’s abuse only after reading newspaper accounts of other victims in 2005.

The Society of Mary, or Marianists, is an international religious order of brothers and priests founded in 1817. In the United States, the order sponsors colleges, high schools, parishes and retreat centers.

Case is State ex rel. Marianist Province of the United States vs. The Honorable John A. Ross, SC88779.

On the Net:

Missouri Judiciary: http://www.courts.mo.gov/