August 2, 2019 — Hundreds of priests from the Archdiocese of New York have been “credibly accused” of sexually abusing children, including 3 priests who worked or lived in San Diego.
Investigators from a Minnesota law firm that specializes in sexual abuse scoured public records for reports of perpetrators who were publicly accused of sexually molesting children.
In early 2019, lawyers named a list of more than 300 priests who were “credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor.”
To read details about the priest sexual abuse in San Diego and New York, please view “The Anderson Report on Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of New York.”
Three of the priests had ties to San Diego, including:
- The Rev. John Dennis Mitchell — Accused of sexually abusing a minor around 1969, while working at Los Angeles’ St. John the Apostle Church. He later served a chaplain at Mercy Hospital from 1978 through 1980. He died in 1998.
- The Rev. Edward Augustine Sheehy — Accused of molesting children in San Diego between 1955 and 1957. At the time, he was on the staff of Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco. He died in 1988.
- The Rev. Donald G. Timone — Accused of sexually abusing a minor between 1966 and 1970, when he was at St. Joseph’s parish in Millbrook, N.Y. He is alive.
In recent years, Timone visited San Diego County to assist with the Rancho Santa Fe’s Church of the Nativity. He also taught a course at Escondido’s John Paul the Great University in 2018.
Investigators said that Timone’s journey from New York to San Diego was reminiscent of Monsignor William Kraft, a man who sexually assaulted children in New York before he was sent to San Diego, where he continued to sexually assault children.
Kraft worked for St. Therese parish in Del Cerro, where he was accused of molesting a boy for 5 years and then trying to rape the boy inside the church in 1969. Kraft died in 2001, but it was not until 2007 that the Diocese of San Diego admitted that Kraft had been the subject of numerous complaints about sexual abuse toward children.
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