Child Abuse in Indiana: Pray or Prey?

It’s not a pretty picture, as they say. No, I retract that. It’s a hideous, odious picture of a Midwestern capital that shuts its eyes to child abuse and trafficking, shuts its eyes, closes its doors to victims, and slams its doors against mandatory reporters like teachers.

Years ago, CPS, in an Indianapolis suburb, would repeatedly receive reports of a prolific child molester, a prominent elected official, and routinely shred them, according to its staff. Long ago, the official left Indianapolis, but his trail of tears stayed.

Now, City headlines tout such good news as “Indianapolis man won’t go to prison for molesting daughter with cancer.” Even if you believe in climate change, the climate for kids in Indy is not changing, except for the worse.

If your heart breaks to know that this tiny victim of predation gets no justice, move. I am quite serious. Show your intolerance for hate against children with your feet and the seat of your pants. Do not let your children and grandchildren grow up in a climate of hate against the child, hate against the sanctity of the child.

Can we envisage a more vulnerable victim than a 6-year-old girl with brain cancer, spending several months in the hospital, a year in chemotherapy, and being abused nightly by her father? Marion Superior Court Magistrate Steven Rubick ruled that this Super Dad deserved a chance to financially support his wife and children, although he had failed to do so for the year after being prosecuted when he was living in the family home and they could not move back in until he left.

Twelve years of probation for crushing a deathly-ill child’s life … Indy should be proud of its continuing record of protecting predators like the Park Tudor hero basketball coach who preyed upon his student for months and two other students before her.

In exclusive Park Tudor school, where tuition exceeds $20,000 per child per year, a combination basketball coach and chemistry teacher was finally sentenced to 14 years in prison for his repeated crimes against one of his Park students, after the school’s attorney, Michael Blickman, partner in Ice Miller law firm, refused to provide law enforcement with child pornography evidence that he had obtained directly from the victim’s family until three weeks after receiving said graphic images and written messages between the predator and the victim … three weeks during which a predator was being effectively protected from prosecution by withholding of evidence.

Where is Blickman’s prosecution 1 ½ years after he illegally obtained child pornography, transferred it to his own thumb drive, took it to the Ice Miller offices, and withheld the evidence from law enforcement for three weeks? U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler, per reports in the Indianapolis Star, when asked about Park Tudor’s handling of the evidence, merely said, “We’ll save that for another day.” Does anyone believe that Michael Blickman would have been allowed to possess and transfer child pornography and to withhold the explicit evidence of crimes against a child if he were not in a protected class of people, as was the prominent Indianapolis public official who was a prolific child molester?

Looking at the facts of the Park Tudor case is a disgusting revelation of how precious children are sacrificed for political considerations. The timeline shows that Park’s coach not only repeatedly exchanged pornographic pictures and videos with his victim for months and Michael Blickman withheld the evidence of said crimes for three weeks from law enforcement, but it took the Indiana Department of Child Services multiple reports of the crimes and 20 days from the initial report to DCS for a DCS case manager to speak to the family for the first time. Thirty-seven days after the initial report, detectives interviewed the head of Park Tudor, who allegedly hanged himself in his garage at his home adjacent to the Park Tudor campus two days later on a Saturday morning, which suicide has been widely reported as being “unrelated to investigation” going on at his school. The proximity in time between the Headmaster’s interview and his reported suicide was certainly a mere coincidence.

In a case that involves the questionable death of a brilliant man, husband, father of two children, exceedingly handsome, Headmaster of one of Indiana’s most exclusive private schools, living in a home valued at over $800,000, who would possibly believe that his reported suicide, two days after being interviewed by law enforcement on a child pornography case in which the evidence was withheld from detectives for three weeks by the attorney advising him, was for reasons “unrelated to” the crimes being investigated?

Indianapolis attorney Jack Crawford, according to Indianapolis Star reports, is quoted, “That’s child pornography,” commenting on Blickman’s making of copies of explicit messages and images and keeping them at his office. Blickman also allowed the predator to take his school computer home with him to remove “personal” content after Blickman had control of the evidence of the coach’s crimes against the child; yet, Blickman remains unprosecuted.

In the Park Tudor Deferred Prosecution Agreement between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the school, only the Headmaster, now dead, is subject “to prosecution for the offense of Misprision of a Felony, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 4,” meaning failure to promptly report a felony to appropriate authorities; although it is irrefutable that Blickman was actually the owner of the child pornography for three weeks and was the legal counsel for the Headmaster, advising him on handling the crimes at hand committed by Park Tudor’s coach. Nowhere in the Deferred Prosecution Agreement is the name of Michael Blickman ever printed or the offense of Misprision of a Felony attributed to Blickman, only to a dead Headmaster.

Taking a look at the predator and the evidence placed before Magistrate Judge Debra McVicker Lynch, it is astonishing to note that she ruled against the prosecutors’ recommendation that the coach remain jailed at a federal prison until his trial, commenting, “I am troubled by the gross immaturity,” referring to the coach’s communications with a minor Park Tudor student who knocked the victim to the ground after she had reported the coach’s crimes, saying, “It was fun knocking her to the ground.” The coach’s reply was, “It would have been pretty epic if you would have caused a concussion lol,” and “I would turn my head if you messed her up.”

Is this “gross immaturity,” or is it violent, dangerous, vicious rhetoric from a teacher and coach after he has been caught in his crimes against a child, encouraging another child to attack her, which attack did indeed occur at Park Tudor, further traumatizing the victim and her friend, who was also attacked by their fellow classmate.

Judge Lynch and the coach’s attorney in this abysmal case have served together in the Senior Counsel division of the Indy Bar Association.

Unbelievably, with all of the irrefutable evidence in hand of repeated crimes against a child, the coach was not arrested until seven weeks after his resignation from Park, with his protective father proclaiming, “I don’t believe my son is a criminal.” The predator’s attorney, James Voyles, who has repeatedly served as the President and Vice President of the Indy Bar, boasted that 47 people had written letters to the court on behalf of the predator, which letters described the predatory coach as “paint[ing] a picture of a wonderful young man.” This “wonderful young man,” after he had been exposed as a remorseless serial predator, repeatedly tried to persuade his victim to take the blame herself for the crimes he had committed and texted the male Park student, who had violently attacked the victim and her friend on the Park campus, “The nice thing is that I can get any job in the state.”

In the face of all of the written and visual evidence indisputably proving that a Park Tudor teacher had repeatedly committed crimes against a student and additionally against two other students beginning in 2010, prior to said series of crimes, U.S. District Judge Larry J. McKinney ordered a sentence of only 14 years, for which crimes the law permits life in prison.

At this point in time, Magistrate Judge Lynch had refused to incarcerate the predator before his trial; law enforcement did not arrest the predator until seven weeks after his forced resignation and confidentiality agreement with Park Tudor had been signed; DCS did not investigate the case until 20 days after the initial report had been received; detectives did not interview the headmaster of Park Tudor until 37 days after the initial report; Michael Blickman, law partner at Ice Miller, who possessed child pornography and brought it to his office for three weeks, has never been prosecuted; two Park Tudor girls, the victim and her friend, were assaulted at school because the coach had been exposed for his crimes against one of the girls; and children’s lives were needlessly and irreparably harmed either as victims of the crimes or potential victims who know of the crimes and were left unprotected by the entire system from top to bottom.

To be certain, the persons who did not commit Misprision of a Felony were the family members of the victim; yet, they have suffered and will continue to suffer immeasurably for blowing the whistle on the Park Tudor coach who had affairs with at least three students beginning in 2010, according to reports. What really happens to the reporter of child abuse? As we have learned through generations of children and families reporting child abuse in the Catholic Church, the children themselves commonly become the victims of betrayal and abandonment by society, namely their community, neighbors, clergy, educators, and others they should be able to trust implicitly for solace and support during their times of intense crisis, after reporting crimes committed against them.

Let me direct you to my case of reporting child abuse to the Boone County court involving a convicted predator who had committed three separate counts of Child Molesting Class B Felony when committed by an adult. When I served the mother of the convicted molester a subpoena for her to testify under oath about her son’s six-year close relationship with minor children whom I sought to protect, Boone Judge Steven David immediately quashed my subpoena and thereafter ordered me to pay the child molester’s family $60,000. The Indiana Supreme Court subsequently refused to hear my appeal, and later, Steven David was appointed to become Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court.

In his order to me, issued just before Mother’s Day, Judge David described the predator as a young boy who tugged at the pants of a child (in addition to his first victim for whom he had been incarcerated). Because the second molestation was never prosecuted, the victim had no recourse to obtain justice. Judge David, now Justice David, fined me $60,000. for serving a subpoena on the predator’s family, despite the fact that the Marion Superior Court judge actually hearing the criminal case against the predator specifically acknowledged his danger to society, noting specifically “the seriousness/repetitiveness of the delinquent act … endangering the safety and welfare of the community ….”

Like the family that reported the crimes of the Park Tudor coach, my family suffered immeasurably for reporting the crimes of the grandson of a prominent developer in Indianapolis.

In his Affidavit for Probable Cause, the detective noted that the predator had molested a child much younger than he in multiple ways, and additionally had destroyed the little girl’s doll by cutting out the private area, stuffing the doll with things to make it look like his victim, and then setting fire to the victim’s dolls “to release his anger.” Later, while on probation, the predator was found with “eight drawings of people performing and receiving deviant sexual acts,” for which the probation department requested a revocation of probation. At the present time, the predator, now much older, spews dark foreboding poetry on the Internet about “blood blood blood” and brags that he does online videos and work in lingerie specializing in fetish.

At the time that Judge David described the predator’s molestation of a second victim as a young boy tugging at the pants of a child, he was President of the Indiana Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and has been currently appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court to serve on the Judicial Conference Court Improvement Program Executive Committee, the Judicial Conference Juvenile Justice Improvement Committee, the Judicial Conference Strategic Planning Committee, and the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, amongst other programs and committees.

During the time that convicted child trafficker, Jared Fogel, was being investigated by the FBI for sexually abusing children in the United States and other countries of the world, I personally witnessed a serious child abuse incident by an afterschool counselor, weighing approximately 350 pounds, lying on top of a child, who was moaning and groaning while being pinned down by the counselor on a bare floor against a concrete wall, which abuse I immediately reported. A home base for Jared Fogel, the afterschool counselor, and the predator I reported to Steven David was the same facility, where all of these men frequented and where I was targeted as a whistleblower.

Enter my husband’s boss, Robert W. York, a hearing officer for the Indiana Supreme Court in attorney disciplinary cases, whose law firm had employed my husband for years prior to my reports of serious child abuse at the popular facility frequented by predators. York also served with the coach’s attorney and 13 other lawyers and judges in the Indy Bar Senior Counsel Division, including the supervising judge of the Marion County courts. Upon learning of my reports, York pulled my husband into his office with an ultimatum, that being, paraphrased, “either your wife does not further expose the popular facility [where predators frequent] through litigation, or you’re fired.” Indeed, my husband was fired by York, whose visceral hostility against our family has never abated in a dozen years.

Enter Robert W. York again, when a few years later, York represented one of my husband’s former clients, resulting in the suspension by the Indiana Supreme Court, where Judge Steven David serves, of my husband’s law license on minimal grounds, in order to further punish and silence our family for reporting crimes against children.

Enter Robert W. York again, ten years after he fired my husband, when York is appointed by a judge, who himself was appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court, to serve as the administrator of my Dad’s estate. As administrator, York took actions to ensure that my husband’s administrative expenses could not be collected from my Dad’s estate – over $50,000.00 in funds that my husband had advanced to pay the estate’s bills.

Enter York again, now seeking contempt of court citations for fines and imprisonment against both my husband and me by making allegations, documented as false, against us. The judge, the long-time colleague of York in close-knit Lawrence Township, was appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court to supervise the Estate of Holocaust Survivor Al Katz, my Dad. The day of our intended arrests is September 6, 2017, at 1:00 PM, in the courtroom of Judge James Joven on the 14th floor of the City-County Building in Indianapolis, and the media have been banned by the court from taking photographs or making any recordings of our arrests.

In this case, our efforts to report to the Marion County court, as required by the federal Misprision of Felony law, the documented crimes committed by Robert York were met swiftly by orders from Judge Joven that we are forbidden to disrespect York; and our motion for the court to refer Robert York to law enforcement under the Misprision of Felony statute was immediately denied.

What do all of these cases emanating from Indiana have in common? Abusers are protected in Indiana; reporters of abuse are marked; and victims are marred for life. Those who commit child abuse, even heinous serial molestations of young children, are given light sentences, only probation, or remain unprosecuted; but those who report such child abuse can face decades of retribution for their exposure of protected predators who end up in our children’s classrooms or on the Internet making on-line videos laced with fetish lingerie and pornography to lure children into a dark web world from which many will enter innocently and never escape.

Our goal is to get hundreds of letters/emails in support of us sent to:

Vice President Mike Pence, the former Gov. of Indiana
vice.president@whitehouse.gov

Richard Payne Attorney for Indiana Supreme Court
Richard.payne@courts.in.gov

Judge Timothy Oakes Presiding Judge of the Marion Superior Court
toakes@indy.gov

Surely, we should get hundreds of emails in support of us when the predator at Park Tudor school got 47 letters sent to the court in support of him. Please blind copy me with your letters/emails, and urge others to speak out against these grotesque injustices in Indiana to children and elders.

For your information, Robert York and the court are fully informed by expert medical opinions filed with the court that travelling to Indianapolis from Florida is dangerous to my health, medically impermissible, and possibly lethal; but both demand for me to risk my life and health to personally appear before Judge Joven on York’s fraudulent claims that I did not file a second accounting in Dad’s probate case (which second accounting was filed in 2015 and so appears on the court’s own docket) and that I interfered with the sale of Dad’s home by objecting to its sale without any court hearing on administrative expenses owed to my husband for over four years. For these fraudulent claims, I am to risk my life in violation of my religious convictions that I can never risk my life but in extreme emergencies. Since I cannot travel without risking my life, I am to be arrested and shipped to Indianapolis on September 6, 2017.

Please act now, urge others to speak now, and contact the media to cover this story. For further information and documentation, you can reach me at helpelders@hotmail.com.

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