An Orleans Parish grand jury indicted a 91-year-old priest on rape charges Thursday — decades after the crime had occurred, the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office revealed.
Lawrence Hecker, who spent most of his time as a member of the New Orleans Archdiocese, told Catholic church officials in 1999 about how he’d sexually engaged with at least three underaged boys in the 1970s, according to the Guardian.
In August, Hecker told reporters he’d participated in simultaneous masturbation with someone who was under 16. Still, it took authorities until this week to charge him with aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft, which are all felony crimes.
“He should have been prosecuted a long time ago,” New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams said during a news conference Thursday, adding that he believes that “a whole lot of adults should have done a whole lot more to protect children from Lawrence Hecker.”
Williams did not provide specific details regarding the crimes at the conference and did not directly answer a question about how many survivors came forward in the criminal case.
Yet, he said without the bravery of the survivors, an indictment would not have been possible.
Church officials sent Lawrence away to a psychiatric facility after his late-90s admission, documents reviewed by the Guardian show. There, he was diagnosed with pedophilia. Experts determined that he should not be placed in situations where he might be around children or vulnerable adults.
Church officials identified him as an accused predator in 2018.
Despite this, it took until 2002 for Hecker to retire from the church. In Louisiana, a statutes of limitation on rape crimes does not exist, which enabled authorities to bring the charges against the former priest.
Aaron Hebert, one of Hecker’s survivors, publicly went forward with his claims against the former priest in 2021. On a website for survivors of childhood sex abuse, he wrote about how when he was 13, Hecker took him and a couple of school athletes to the church to perform a pretend hernia examination on them.
That’s when Hebert said Hecker groped his genitals. Hebert said that neither him nor his friends reported the incident to school officials because they believed Hecker to be a person of authority. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 86 percent of child abuse goes unreported.
When it is reported, often a high percentage of instances are not disclosed until adulthood. The average age people who survive child sex abuse report it is 52.
Not telling authority figures about what happened has left Hebert with feelings of guilt, he wrote on the website.
“I felt that if I could have told someone, somebody, even my parents, that perhaps Father Hecker would be held accountable for what he done to our innocence.”
