Pa. attorney general charges five more Jehovah’s Witnesses with sexual abuse

The girl was 10.

She and her mother had moved into the Lancaster County home of Norman Aviles, a Jehovah’s Witnesses elder helping the girl’s mother save money for a house by letting them live with his family in 2004.

Aviles, who was 26, and affiliated with a pair of Spanish-speaking congregations in the area, told the girl that she was special, according to state investigators.

His compliments soon escalated. He allegedly made the girl sit on his lap, wrestled her, and groped her.

Years later, she would testify to a state grand jury that she remembered Aviles had told her that she was “tempting men,” and that it was “her fault.” And she wasn’t alone: As a child, she had met twin sisters, fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses in Lancaster, who claimed Aviles had sexually assaulted them in the late 1990s, when they were just 5 or 6 years old.

On Tuesday, the state Attorney General’s Office charged Aviles with aggravated indecent assault, corruption of minors, and related offenses. Now 44, he remains at large. Authorities say they believe he has recently been in Puerto Rico. Four additional Witnesses, ranging in age from 42 to 74, were arrested as part of an ongoing grand jury investigation of child sex abuse within the Witnesses’ organization.

“The details of these crimes are sad and disturbing, facts which are made even more abhorrent because the defendants used their faith communities or their own families to gain access to victims,” said acting Attorney General Michelle Henry.

“Our office will never stop working to seek justice for those who have been victimized, and we will continue to investigate and prosecute anyone who harms the most vulnerable in our society.”

The grand jury probe began in 2019, just a year after The Inquirer published an investigation that examined how Witness leaders routinely ostracized and punished survivors who spoke up about the abuse they suffered, or sought help from police.

» READ MORE: Silent Witnesses: 'A recipe for child abuse'

In October, the Attorney General’s Office filed assault charges against four other longtime Witnesses, who were accused of abusing 19 minors.

The cases often follow familiar paths: Predators take advantage of the insular nature of the Witnesses’ religion, and the organization’s strict hierarchy, which places a great deal of authority in the hands of elders, who are the equivalent of priests.

Details about suspected sex crimes are documented in files, known as S-77 forms, that the Witnesses maintain in their headquarters, about 45 miles outside New York City.

Witness leaders have, in the past, gone to great lengths to withhold information about abusers within their ranks. One official, in 2017, instructed elders to destroy handwritten notes and drafts of internal records, explaining, “We’ve run into difficulties in the past because of the records we have.”

For abuse survivors, this has meant justice has often been out of reach.

State investigators noted that Aviles faced legal scrutiny once before. In 2010, Lancaster City police investigated his alleged abuse of the twin girls.

The girls’ mother, a devoted Witness, had invited Aviles to move into her house in 1998, after learning he was looking for a place to stay.

She trusted Aviles to babysit her children while she worked the night shift at a Wal-Mart.

Instead, the sisters later testified, Aviles abused them while they slept in their beds. The girls’ mother initially dismissed their claims; they thought she was wary of leveling a serious allegation against a fellow Witness.

A therapist for one of the sisters later reported the girls’ abuse to Lancaster authorities, who interviewed Aviles.

“If it did happen,” he told police, “I must have done it unconsciously.”

Aviles also acknowledged that he monitored the sisters’ social media accounts. But the Lancaster investigation was ultimately closed, state investigators found, due to a “lack of information” — a reference to the Witnesses’ long-standing reluctance to turn over internal records.

The Witnesses arrested Tuesday are:

*Abimael Valentin-Matos, 42, who was charged with indecent assault and related offenses for allegedly coercing a 15-year-old girl to perform a sex act on him in 2009. Valentin-Matos, of Lancaster County, had convinced elders that he intended to marry the teen — an arrangement that the elders approved of, provided that Valentin-Matos courted her in the presence of a chaperone.

*Kevin Isovitsch, 51, who was charged with raping a 9-year-old relative in his Butler County home in 2005.

*Mark Brown, 65, who was charged with aggravated indecent assault and endangering the welfare of children for allegedly sexually assaulting two sisters on more than 20 occasions between 2004 and 2006, when each was about 12 or 13, in Allegheny County. Investigators found that the girls reported their abuse to Witness leaders.

*Raymond Shultz, 74, who was charged with aggravated indecent assault and endangering the welfare of children for allegedly sexually abusing two sisters under age 10 between 2000 and 2007 in Butler County. Shultz later mailed $2,500 checks to each sister, to whom he was related, which they believed was meant to be “hush money.”

The Attorney General’s Office encouraged anyone with information about the Jehovah’s Witnesses cases to call the office’s hotline: at 888-538-8541. Reports of child sexual abuse can also be made to ChildLine, at 1-800-932-0313.