WEST CHESTER — The Chester County jury hearing the case of a Philadelphia man accused of sexually assaulting his young son when he visited the child’s mother in Parkesburg found the man guilty on all charges.
The panel of seven women and five men returned to Judge Analisa Sondergaard’s courtroom around 7 p.m. Wednesday with its verdict after deliberating for about 3½ hours, accepting the child’s version of events in which he said his father has molested him while they were watching a movie in his mother’s bedroom.
The man was found guilty of rape of a child, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, endangering the welfare of children, and corruption of minors. Following the reading of the verdict, the defendant was returned to Chester County Prison, where he has been held on $250,000 bail since his arrest in November 2021.
Sentencing by Sondergaard will take place at a future date. He faces a possible sentence of many years in state prison, as the charges include first-degree felonies.
The defendant’s name is being withheld to shield the identity of the young boy’s, a 10-year-old whose testimony was at the heart of the three-day-long trial in the Chester County Justice Center. The MediaNews Group does not identify the victims of alleged sexual assaults.
The prosecution, led by First Assistant District Attorney Erin O’Brien, had contended that even though there were no clear eyewitnesses to the assault or any forensic evidence, the jury could find the man guilty simply on the testimony of the boy, should they believe him. Their verdict signaled that the jurors did.
On the other hand, the defense hoped to focus on inconsistencies in the boy’s descriptions of what happened to him the day his father visited his mother at the home in Parkesburg. That effort, however, apparently did not gain traction.
The defendant did not testify on his own behalf.
According to an arrest affidavit filed by then-Sgt. Richard Moran of the Parkesburg police, the assault was first reported by the boy’s mother in August 2021 after she said that her son had disclosed to her being sexually assaulted by his father earlier in the summer.
She said that when the man visited on July 3, 2021, he initially said he wanted to sleep in the same bed as the child, but that she forbade him from doing so. Instead, he slept in her bed but the two did not talk.
The next morning, the man went into her room with the boy and began watching a movie that the woman said was inappropriate for a child his age. She left the room, but when she returned she found the two were again watching the movie. She again objected, and the man threw the television remote control at her, shouting, “What are you trying to accuse me of?”
She left and then returned, and this time found her son completely under the bed covers, lying with his head towards the man’s waist. The man had rewound the movie to the scene the boy’s mother felt was inappropriate.
It was not until several days later that the mother, in questioning her son about what happened, said she learned what the boy’s father had allegedly done. She called the police.
The boy was then later interviewed by Chester County Detective Gerald Davis Jr. of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit. In that session, the boy first said that his father has touched his “pee-pee” with his penis. But after further questioning from Davis, a trained forensic interviewer, the boy disclosed that his father had raped him anally and made him perform oral sex on him.
In halting and hushed testimony on Tuesday, the boy also said that his father made him put his mouth on his penis.
The case originally included suggestions that the sexual abuse had begun earlier at the family home in King of Prussia, Upper Merion. The allegations were never fully explored in court, but the jury did find in its verdict that the offense of indecent assault amounted to a “course of conduct.”
To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan call 610-696-1544.
