Abuse victims help send bill for Senate vote

[Ian David]

After harrowing testimony, plan to extend time for civil suits clears panel

By BETH MILLER, The News Journal
Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007

DOVER -- Robert Quill drove two days from Marathon, Fla., to tell his horror story to a state Senate committee and urge lawmakers to change Delaware's civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse.

Quill said he was a victim of the Rev. Francis G. DeLuca -- the retired Delaware priest arrested in the fall in Syracuse, N.Y., and charged with sexually abusing a teen there.

"If I constructed a complete and accurate narrative of my adolescence, recounting in detail each of the hundreds of episodes of DeLuca's craven sexual abuse of a child, few could listen to the entire story without being physically sickened," Quill said.

Kristine Geisler, 17, of Newark, wept as she recounted how someone in her neighborhood abused her from the time she was 6 until she was 9 years old. Jack Keating wore a photograph of himself as a little boy, around the age that his sexual abuse started. And Ed Burke told lawmakers he can remember every detail of the abuse he suffered as a boy 62 years ago.

More:
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070322/NEWS/703220355/1006/NEWS