As a jury was picked Monday, a dispute arose outside the courtroom over whether a settlement had been reached with two of the three major defendants in a sexual abuse lawsuit filed by 14 victims of a former Lutheran pastor.
The Chicago-based Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, both reported tentative settlements in the case. That would leave the ELCA's Northern Texas-Northern Louisiana Synod, headquartered in Dallas, as the only remaining defendant in one of the most serious sexual abuse cases ever to hit a major U.S. Protestant denomination.
However, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs disputed the settlement claims.
"There have been no settlements," attorney Edward Hohn said after a jury of eight men and four women was picked Monday afternoon. "The case is going to trial as to all defendants. That's all the comment I've got."
The case involves Gerald Patrick Thomas, a former minister of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in this East Texas town. Thomas, who attended Trinity Lutheran Seminary, was sentenced last year to 397 years in state prison for sex crimes involving boys he befriended and lured into a world of child pornography, videotaped indecency and sexual assault.
John Brooks, spokesman for the 5 million-member denomination, and Scott Shanes, attorney for the Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, both said formal settlement approval could come as soon as April 12. That is when District Judge Bonnie Leggat has scheduled opening statements in the case.
"There's been a settlement reached with all 14 plaintiffs," said Shanes, a Dallas-based attorney who skipped jury selection Monday. "That's just subject to court approval now."
Neither Brooks nor Shanes would discuss details or how much the victims might be paid.
Asked why the defendants would be reporting a settlement if the case were headed to trial, plaintiffs' spokeswoman Lyda Creus Molanphy said, "I think court documents will show and we will prove that these defendants have a history of not telling the truth, which is why we find ourselves in this position to begin with."
Church officials have repeatedly denied negligence, despite private memos that detailed Thomas' questionable behavior before he was assigned to Marshall in 1997.
"It is uncontested, we believe, that immediately after the bishop learned of his arrest and the criminal charges against Thomas, the bishop received Thomas' resignation from the clergy roster," Brooks said in a recent written statement.
Thomas, now 41, misspelled his first name as "Gearal" on the essay he wrote in 1993 applying to the seminary.
In the essay, the former pizza delivery manager, who would later flunk both New Testament and Old Testament, discussed his work with inner-city teenagers who "lived in roach-infested houses."
In 1996, as a ministry intern at a small Lutheran church in rural Wilson, Texas, near Lubbock, he befriended two poor Hispanic brothers, ages 13 and 14, often inviting them to stay overnight, according to a private seminary memo included in court records.
But when the boys started avoiding Thomas, their father contacted sheriff's deputies, who learned the boys drank tequila with Thomas and watched part of a homosexual pornographic video they found at the parsonage.
In the memo to seminary officials, Thomas' intern supervisor Mel Swoyer wrote that Thomas cried and admitted giving the boys alcohol. Thomas denied any sexual contact with the boys and said of the video, "That's something I have wanted to throw away for a long time."
Back in Columbus for his final year of seminary, Thomas volunteered with an after-school youth program.
When the Rev. Carol Stumme, who oversaw the program, discovered two sixth-graders were going to Thomas' apartment on weekends, she reported her concerns. Then, in an April 1997 meeting with Thomas and seminary official Brad Binau, Stumme learned of the earlier situation in Wilson.
"As soon as I heard about the Wilson incident, I knew I was right on," said Stumme, 71, now pastor of Lutheran Memorial Church in Minneapolis.
She banned Thomas from her church.
Binau, meanwhile, urged Thomas to seek therapy to confront confusion in his life.
"He seemed to take my suggestions for therapy seriously though there was no absolute commitment on his part and none sought on my part," Binau wrote in May 1997.
While aware of Thomas' "boundary issues" in seminary, the Northern Texas-Northern Louisiana Synod did not share details of Thomas' background with the Marshall congregation, court records indicate. Synod officials did not return calls seeking comment.
Thomas' crimes weren't exposed until 2001, when a teenager found nude images of friends on the pastor's computer and tried to blackmail him. The FBI was alerted after Thomas took the teen to at least two dealerships looking to buy him a pickup to keep him quiet.
Thomas, convicted on federal child pornography charges, is serving five years at the U.S. Penitentiary in Beaumont. His state sentence will start after that.