BARE NAKED Father Daly Burst Out and Turned Himself in to Police Surrounding the Church

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(Another Summer Rerun, this post first appeared March 31, 2007, at CityofAngels3 )

Dive in the files and find the felonies

It had been one short wet ride after another for the two hitchhiking boys. They’d been on the onramp for hours when more rain came. The Arizona-Calexico region got 14 inches after Hurricane Heather that August 1977, but two teenagers hitchhiking to the Haight Ashbury weren't thinking about the weather. Finally headlights approached and slowed to a stop. The boys didn’t even look in the car, just jumped inside.

The driver said in an Irish brogue that he worked and lived at a Catholic Church where there was a place for hitchhikers to clean up, even have a bed to sleep in.

Around two AM the boys burst out of the church doors, one vomited on the side of the road. They ran into the town of Holtville, California, and found a cop.

Soon, officers with weapons drawn heard loud thumps coming from the room in back of the Church where the priest lived. Then…

Out came Father John Daly totally naked, holding the right and left doors wide open with the light pouring down on him, all 250 pounds of his body billowing in the rain and early morning light.

The naked priest snarled as a young Mike Shoemaker identified the priest who sexually assaulted him through the police car window. (In late 2007 Shoemaker won a settlement with the San Diego Archdiocese over the incident.)

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Summer 2006 the arresting officer Dutton testified in deposition for Mike’s case against the San Diego Archdiocese, which settled in 2007.

DUTTON: “I’ve looked at the report you've handed me and it’s incomplete.”

Q: When you say it’s incomplete, what do you mean?

DUTTON: Well the statements aren’t there, the evidence list isn’t there, the copies of the reports that I received from La Mesa and other places about him aren’t there.

Q: Are you talking about the NCIC?

A: No those are also not here. NCIC is not here CI&I is not here if I ran it, I’m sure I did, but also the police reports or whatever department reports from other law enforcement agencies are also not here in what they provided you. And we did receive those and those were made part of the investigative file.

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Holtville is a small town today and in 1977 with no radio, TV, or news report, word got out that Father Daly had been arrested. Dutton testified that people from town started to call, with stories about Father Daly coming out of the rectory with a young boy, and his fly was open.

Mike and Mark stayed in a nearby motel sleeping for several days after John Daly’s arrest.

As they slept the Catholic protect-the-perpetrator machinery went into action.
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(This letter is in the exhibits from Mike Shoemaker’s case against the San Diego Archdiocese, a letter from the local church attorney to Bishop Maher in San Diego explaining how the local parish dispatched of the Father John Daly problem:)

To Bishop Maher
San Diego
Diocesesan office for apostolic Ministry in Alcalala Park, San Diego

“Mr. Flourd, attorney, contacted me, Mark A. Medaer, voluntarily, to engage my assistance in a legal matter.

“On Friday Father John and myself were called to the office of Mr. Flourd. We were told that the District Attorney considered the case “a chargeable criminal complaint.” Mr. Flourd echoing hints from other sources, advised us that if Father John would leave his post he thought some authorities could “argue down” the case with any dissenting parties.

Father John and myself consulted. At 2:00 PM Father Daly decided to go to El Carmelo Retreat, awaiting instructions from the Bishop. (sloppy typing here) Mr. Flourd was advised of the move. He would contact the District Attorney. At 3:00 PM Father John left.

I contacted Father Richard Duncanson and Msgr William Cooney.

“NO COMPLAINT BEING FILED, (their caps) I did not think it necessary to contact the Chancery, knowing furthermore that our Bishop and Chancellor were absent.

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DALY’S SENTENCE: A MONTH IN A RETREAT
John Daly went to El Carmelo Retreat House on August 17, three days after the incident, “upon the advice of Mr. Lewis Flourd, attorney at El Centro,

and myself

Mark Medaer episcopal vicar in the Imperial Valley.”

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January 22 2007

Mike opens the package from his attorney, a copy of the church’s Motion for Summary Judgment granted last week on his case. Mike wasn’t as upset as he’d expected to have his case dismissed. It just meant a few more years of legal lunacy. Other cases had been appealed for disallowed testimony so it was just a matter filing an appeal. (UPDATE: Since his case was dismissed within the same year as the settlement in others in the Coordinated Cases and plaintiff had no time to appeal, Mike got a settlement anyway, ah California law if only all states were so progressive....)

It was the wording of the Motion for Summary Judgment itself, a collection of sentences in the first paragraph of the introduction by Brandy Stanton Cody of DiSante & Freudenberger in San Diego
that still to this day make Mike break out in a string on invectives:

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15 YEAR OLD’S “LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP” WITH AIRLINE PILOT

“Nor was plaintiff a naïve, sexually inexperienced child when the events occurred," reads the first paragraph of the motion.

"A year before the alleged assault, when he was 15, Plaintiff began a long-term relationship with an adult male airline pilot in Arizona in which he exchanged sexual favors for flying time in the pilot’s plane,” writes Brandy Cody.

SHOCK.

“It's never consensual sex with a 15 year old.” -ADA Alexandra Cabot, Law & Order Special Victims

“I was set up like a bowling pin by this guy,” Mike said recently. “And Brom's lawyer places me on intellectual and chronological equal footing with him. I was just another adult, equal to his 30 years or so of college and government training....according to this attorney, I apologize, but this female lawyer is just plainly evil in my sight. I know of no other way to describe her.”

CHURCH ATTORNEY calls it consensual sex

For Mike at age 15 waking up in a room behind a church altar to find a burly Irishman sucking him off was traumatic, doubly so when he found out the ephebophile was a priest.

Brandy Stanton Cody denigrated Michael with a low blow attack that makes it now open season on Brandy Stanton Cody, Associate, Carlton DiSante & Freudenberger LLP, 2001-present. (March 2007)

Church attorneys investigated Mike’s life and found that when he was 15 and hanging out at an airport, he’d been molested by a pilot.

At age 15 Mike was a preying pedophile’s dream target: boy living in trailer with mom and grandmother, some neglect, starved for father figure and support. For Brandy Stanton Cody to represent this earlier molest as a consensual relationship between Mike and an older man --

To make a troglodyte statement that a 15 year old is responsible for whatever sexual situations he finds himself in -

Brandy Stanton Cody, church attorney, has apparently sold her soul to the devil.

I’m sure the San Diego Archdiocese paid Brandy Stanton Cody dearly to smear Mike and twist history, even call Mike a 15 year old predator himself, anything to protect the church’s assets and slam down on the plaintiffs.

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MORE ON BRANDY STANTON CODY
Church Attorneys Deserve Little Respect

As Brandy faced the judge, she was standing in the middle of a line of male lawyers, and I was staring at their backs:

I saw: pants, pants, pants, pants, silky black sheen stockings covering calves and a skirt that barely touches the knees, pants, pants.

Don’t think for a minute that attorneys don’t plan their wardrobes for effect.
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BRANDY STANTON CODY works at (as of March 2007)
Carlton DiSante & Freudenberger
4510 Executive Drive, Suite 300
San Diego CA 92121
858 – 646-0007

Call her. Or better yet, call her boss and complain that she had the audacity to argue that 15-year-old boy is in a consensual relationship with a man in his forties

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WHAT HAPPENED TO DALY'S ARREST RECORD?

Soon after putting some clothes on Father Daly, Dutton ran an NCIC on the station telex. The National Crime Index machine using 1977 state of the art technology printed out an arrest record of Fr. John Daly, for sexual molestation, one in La Mesa a few years earlier and another from San Antonio, Texas.

Where did the NCIC report go from Father Daly’s arrest record?

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CLUES IN THE LETTER TO THE BISHOP

Dutton says that when word got out in Holtville that he'd arrested Father John Daly, several community members contacted him.

“A couple of them said that they recall him coming out of the children’s playroom where children were in the playroom, with his zipper down," he testified in Mike's case.

Q: Okay anything else they recall?

A: They were suspicious of him. But these conversations occurred from community inquiries after the decision had been made not to file charges

Eerily similar words were used in the vicar’s letter to Bishop Maher in San Diego:

“NO COMPLAINT BEING FILED, (their caps) I did not think it necessary to contact the Chancery

Daly spent a month at the retreat house then took another assignment as a priest, and apparently never acted out again. Or at least he never got caught.

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WHY SUE THE CHURCH?

Mike talked recently about why he’d filed the civil case against the San Diego Archdiocese in the first place:

“In 2000 Boston was on TV every night. I did not think that I was affected by the abuse. I had never held a job longer than 18 months, had insomnia, was diagnosed bi polar, but anyway.....so these news stories reminded me of the past and I began to wonder what had happened to Daly. I was certain that he had gone to prison for what he did to me. I emailed the Holtville newspaper ( and only them ) asking what had happened to Daly. They never responded, but KFMB TV in San Diego did instead. The new producer told me that Daly had got off, pardon the pun. because the bishop interviened."

Mike hired an attorney and waited.

He described what happened when he and Mark ran out of the little room behind the church altar, where Daly had a pedophile's pantry of audio tapes of boys talking about sex (exhibits listed on what's left of the police report).

The room was not the rectory. Daly lived in a different building on the church lot. This room was a pedophile den directly behind the altar - a fold out bed, a room divider and another bed, a portable shower -- little else.

"Mark held a large coffee cup over Daly's head, ready to bury it in Daly's head per my profane instruction... while I got dressed...fast. Then I held the pipe I had found while Mark got dressed. During this time we made it very very clear to Daly that if he so much as twitched we do all in our power to stop/kill him."

It was only when he returned with Dutton that Mike realized there was another bed behind the divider. Daly had insisted he had to get in bed with the boys because it was the only bed, and the sleeping bags were drenched. He had to be naked as his clothes were wet too.

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WERE THE DOCUMENTS SHREDDED IN THE NINETIES OR IN 2003?

Did Callahan shred personnel files that were needed as evidence?

This is the case where Monsignor Steve Callahan of San Diego admitted in deposition that in the mid nineties he systematically destroyed personnel documents that dealt with crime or psychological problems such as alcoholism. He used a shredding machine in the basement of University of San Diego’s student pastoral center.

But Callahan did not become Chancellor of San Diego until 2002. The Chancellor is the person who maintains personnel records, so this destruction of files may have been after 2002, or even after 2003, after the one year window for civil action opened in California.

There’s a good chance the Chancellor was destroying files in 2003 after knowing those files would be needed for evidence in upcoming lawsuits.

ISN’T THAT ILLEGAL?

One way to find out when Monsignor Steve Callahan shredded personnel files would be to get him to testify again.

This much did come up in Callahan's deposition in Mike’s case.
Q: So did you keep a summary of the documents?

CALLAHAN: No.

Q: And did you have Bishop Brom’s full permission to do this?

CALLAHAN: Yes.

CHURCH ATTORNEY: Objection, asked and answered.

Too late. A fact about a bishop slipped through.

Callahan also mentioned destroying Servants of the Paraclete files with his shredder. Servants of the Paraclete is a spa in New Mexico that in the sixties and seventies was a “recovery center” for priests with sexual problems.

MONSIGNOR STEVEN CALLAHAN needs to talk at more depositions.

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MY OWN PERSONAL RANT:

If only the church hierarchy had done the right thing as soon as they knew instead of avoiding prosecution and scandal.

They didn't even avoid prosecution and scandal, just put it off a few generations and created thousands of damaged people reeling through life

People like me, with diagnoses like mine: Prolonged PTSD with continued re-victimization (from age 5 to age 45), and now in my late fifties, just PTSD probably for the rest of my life…

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STORY FIRST APPEARED HERE when City of Angels was in its infancy:

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Cover-ups, Destruction of Documents, Concern for Pedophile Pederast Priests Over Children in Just One Clergy Case on San Diego Archdiocese

Dive in the files and find the felonies

"Out came Father John Daly totally naked, holding the doors wide open."It had been one short wet ride after another...
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Summer Rerun posted by Kay Ebeling, Producer, City of Angels Blog