Dallas police raid of Catholic diocese

Missing and incomplete sex-abuse files spark Dallas police raid of Catholic diocese, storage facility

Dallas police officers on Wednesday morning raided several Dallas Catholic Diocese offices after a detective alleged that church officials have not cooperated with his investigations into sexual abuse by its past clergy members.

"To date, the Dallas Police Department has not been given the number of priests' files flagged for sexual abuse," says the affidavit written by Detective David Clark and signed by a state district judge.

Throughout the detailed 31-page search-warrant affidavit, Clark wrote that the Diocese either hid allegations against priests, provided incomplete information to investigators and made it next to impossible for Dallas police to determine whether claims had been made or fully examined. The document also takes the diocese to task for its recent transparency efforts, characterizing them as little more than a public-relations effort.


Clark also writes that when he contacted other law-enforcement agencies across the country that were conducting similar investigations based on search warrants, they all said the same thing: Dioceses willfully refused to turn over information or, in some cases, stashed it in vaults that were only accessed once locks were picked.

The Dallas detective says on multiple occasions, his efforts to get complete records and whole files were repeatedly "thwarted" by the diocese.

The Dallas diocese released a statement after the raid that said officials had "been cooperating with the ongoing investigation of these priests." The diocese will host a news conference at 3 p.m.

But since the police investigation into one of the diocese's priests began last fall, at least five new allegations of sexual abuse have surfaced within the Dallas Catholic Diocese, said Maj. Max Geron, who oversees the special investigations division.

Police investigators, assisted by federal authorities, took files from the diocese's headquarters, a storage site and St. Cecilia, a Catholic church in Oak Cliff, where the priest who sparked the investigation previously served. Geron, at a news conference Wednesday, called the raids "wholly appropriate" for the investigation.

According to the affidavit, police on Wednesday raided the Safesite document-storage facility on W. Ledbetter Drive because that's where the Diocese keeps its "old sexual abuse complaints."

The manager there told Dallas police there are about 700 boxes there from the Dallas Catholic Diocese, and that "some of the boxes contained claimant files for priest who were accused of sexual abuse in the past."