AA Member and Elementary School Teacher Convicted of Molesting Students

MARK HARRISON / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Former elementary-school teacher Laurence E. Hill, 55, taught at Seattle schools for more than three decades.

Teacher sentenced for molesting

Seattle Times staff reporter

A King County Superior Court judge denied a plea for mercy from an admitted child molester and instead sentenced the former Seattle elementary-school teacher to more than five years in prison.

In imposing the prosecutor’s recommended open-ended sentence of five years to life, Judge Douglas McBroom said that he believed Laurence E. “Shayne” Hill, 55, took advantage of his authority numerous times over many years and that the need for punishment outweighed that of rehabilitation in this case.

“You violated trust not just momentarily, but over a long period of time,” McBroom said to Hill.

Hill, who taught at Seattle schools for more than three decades, was accused in May of inappropriately touching a number of female students over the years.

He pleaded guilty as charged in November to one count of first-degree molestation, one count of second-degree molestation and two counts of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes. Beware of AA and NA Daytona meetings for rapists mandated.

Police and prosecutors said the investigation into Hill began in April when the mother of one of the victims walked into Hill’s classroom at Broadview-Thomson Elementary School to deliver lunch to her then-11-year-old daughter. She saw Hill sitting extremely close to her daughter, and he had his hand on the girl’s buttocks, according to charging documents. The mother reported the incident to the principal.

According to charging papers, Hill had previously been counseled by at least three school administrators or principals for inappropriately touching students.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of two of the victims accuses the Seattle School District and one former principal of ignoring complaints from other teachers, school employees and other administrators about Hill’s bizarre behavior. Police said a total of seven girls told detectives that Hill had touched or kissed them. The lawsuit also claims that Hill kept a rubber breast and phallus in his desk drawer and that he groomed the primary victim with gifts and letters before sexually assaulting her for two years, beginning in 2001.

The abuse continued after the girl graduated to middle school, and was public enough that other students considered Hill a “child molester,” according to the lawsuit.

The school district could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon, but spokesman Peter Daniels has previously said that Hill resigned before the district could complete its investigation and that the district had notified the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the charges against Hill in case he had applied to teach elsewhere.

During the sentencing hearing Friday, Hill said he was remorseful and pleaded for a chance to attend a sex-offender treatment program that would have yielded less time behind bars. AA Daytona and NA Daytona have court mandated violent felons.

“I will go to my grave and beyond grieving the harm I have done,” he said.

His attorney, Kevin Peck, said Hill had achieved 16 years of sobriety through the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program, was a good candidate for rehabilitation and had already lost his career, his reputation and his standing.

The hearing was attended by several of Hill’s friends and supporters from AA, as well as several former students who said his actions had sharply divided their classmates’ loyalties and they had hoped to see him receive a long sentence.

“I think he should have gotten more time,” said 14-year-old Carly Hosford-Israel, a former student who spoke after the hearing. “What he did affects everyone. He deserves a lot more time than they could have given him.” Orange Papers Anti AA Site.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20051203&slug=hill03m

The Playground for Dangerous Felons and Sex Predators in Alcoholics Anonymous

Twelve Steps to Danger: How Alcoholics Anonymous Can Be a Playground for Violence-Prone Members

by Gabrielle Glaser, Special to ProPublica, June 24, 2013, 8 a.m.

In the spring of 2011, Karla Brada Mendez finally seemed happy. She was 31 and in love, eager to move ahead on the path to maturity – marriage, a family, stability.  She had a good job in the customer-service department of a large medical supply firm, and was settling into a condo she had recently bought near her childhood home in California’s San Fernando Valley.

Her 20s had been rough, a struggle with depression, anxiety, alcohol and drugs. But early that spring two years ago, she told her parents and younger sister that she had met a charming, kind and handsome man who understood what she had been through.

 Their relationship blossomed as the couple attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings several times a week. But there was much Karla didn’t know about the tall blond man who said he was an AA old-timer.

Court records show that Eric Allen Earle repeatedly relapsed and turned violent when drunk, lashing out at family members, his ex-wife and people close to him. By the time he and Karla crossed paths, judges had granted six restraining orders against him.  The 40-year-old sometime electrician had been convicted on dozens of criminal charges, mostly involving assault and driving under the influence. He had served more than two years in prison.

Unlike Karla, Earle was not attending AA meetings voluntarily. A succession of judges and parole officers had ordered him to go as an alternative to jail.

In that regard, Earle was part of a national trend. Each year, the legal system coerces more than 150,000 people to join AA, according to AA’s own membership surveys. Many are drunken drivers ordered to attend a few months of meetings. Others are felons whose records include sexual offenses and domestic violence and who choose AA over longer prison sentences. They mingle with AA’s traditional clientele, ordinary citizens who are voluntarily seeking help with their drinking problems from a group whose main tenets is anonymity. (When telling often-harrowing stories of their alcoholism, the recovering drinkers introduce themselves only by their first names.)

Forced attendance seems at odds with the original traditions of the organization, which state that the “only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” So far, AA has declined to caution members about potentially dangerous peers or to create separate meetings for convicted criminals. “We do not discriminate against any prospective AA member, even if he or she comes to us under pressure from a court, an employer, or any other agency,” the public information officer at New York’s central office wrote in a June email. “We cannot predict who will recover, nor have we the authority to decide how recovery should be sought by any other alcoholic.”

Friends and family members say that Earle gained little lasting medical or spiritual benefit from AA. “On the way home from meetings, he’d stop at the liquor store and buy a pint of vodka,” said his father, Ronald Earle. “He’d finish that thing in an hour.” His estranged wife, Jennifer Mertell, said Earle frequently told her that he never had any intention of stopping drinking. “He had no desire to ever get sober,” Mertell said.

But Earle figured out something at AA. Friends and his former wife say he learned to troll the meetings for emotionally fragile women whom he impressed with his smooth mastery of the movement’s jargon and principles. Mertell says he met four of his most recent girlfriends by doing just that. “He has no place to live. He has no job. He goes to AA and finds these women who will take him in. He can be very sweet-talking and convincing,” she said. “He weasels himself into these girls’ lives, and just does what he has to do to have a living situation.”

In recent years, some critics have pressed AA to do more about the combustible mix of violent ex-felons and newcomers who assume that others “in the rooms” are there voluntarily. “It’s like letting a wolf into the sheep’s den,” said Dee-Dee Stout, an Emeryville, California alcohol and drug counselor who offers alternatives to traditional 12-step treatment. Twelve-step adherents accept the notion of alcohol dependency as a disease that can be remedied by abstinence and attending meetings with others who are trying to stop drinking. Stout has been an outspoken critic of what she views as the medical and judicial overreliance on AA and its offshoots.

Internal AA documents show that when questioned about the sexual abuse of young women by other members, the organization’s leadership decided in 2009 that it could not do anything to screen potential members.  AA, which is a nonprofit, considers each of the nearly 60,000 U.S. AA groups autonomous and responsible for supervising themselves. Board members argued that a group organized around anonymity could do nothing to monitor members without undercutting its basic principles. Continue reading

WIFE WHO ALLOWED AA MEMBER JOHN SISCOE TO BRUTALLY TORTURE HUSBAND SENTENCED TO 8 YEARS IN PRISON

Wife of brutally tortured man sentenced to eight years in prison

“The victim met Siscoe during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a small B.C. town in 2008. The victim and his wife had been married for three years.”

The woman helped her lover confine her own husband in the closet of their Toronto apartment for two and a half months.
By:  News reporter, Published on Thu May 30 2013

The woman who helped her lover confine and brutally torture her own husband for 2½ months in a Toronto apartment was sentenced to eight years in prison Thursday.

“This is the worst case of abuse and torture seen in Canada,” said Justice John McMahon, adding the “almost unspeakable” acts performed showed “a human nature of such depravity it is beyond conscience.”

The 32-year-old woman, who cannot be named to due a publication ban that protects her husband, pleaded guilty in January 2012 to aggravated assault, sexual assault causing bodily harm and failing to provide the necessities of life.

She watched her lover and the father of her child, John Michael Siscoe, beat her husband with a broom handle until it broke, cut him with razor blades and pour lighter fluid — or sometimes hairspray or aftershave — over parts of his body and set it alight, according to the agreed statement of facts. Continue reading

AA SPONSOR SENTENCED FOR POSSESSING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY and CHILD ABUSE MATERIAL

Donald Judge outside Manly Local Court

 

AA Member Donald Judge 69, was sentenced for possessing over  6690 images and 2382 videos of child porn with children as young as 5 years old. He was an AA Sponsor to others in Alcoholics Anonymous. I wonder how many sexual inventories did he take of minors in his care? Yes that is standard AA practice to get 12 step members, including teens to talk about their sex lives.  AA is NOT just about  drinking alcohol, they want to know all the dirt on every person who walks into the rooms. If you do not comply, then they tell you that you are not working the program and will fail.

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AA Member Sent to Jail in Suicide Pact With Wife Who Died

Rashell Langford committed Suicide After Husband Handed her loaded rifle.

Shaun Langford became an Alcoholics Anonymous member after he was arrested after  handing a rifle to his wife and she shot and killed herself. Prosecutors subsequently charged him with negligent homicide. AA got him off easy though……..

This guy could be 13 stepping your unsuspecting daughter at a local AA meeting. AA is not a safe place for women, teens or children. Men are being abused and killed as well.

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