The Associated Press State & Local Wire
May 21, 2002, Tuesday, BC cycle
7:46 AM Eastern Time
SECTION: State and Regional
LENGTH: 400 words
HEADLINE: Leader of Jehovah's Witness congregation charged with sexual abuse
DATELINE: CHASE, Md.
BODY:
Police have charged a former leader of a Jehovah's Witness congregation in Chase with sexually abusing three women who say
the congregation discouraged them from reporting the abuse.
David R. Shumaker, 39, of Felton, Pa., will be tried July 15 in Baltimore County Circuit Court on several sex offense counts and
one count of attempted rape. The incidents allegedly occurred between 1974 and 1984. At the time, the women were children
and teen-agers in the congregation and Shumaker was a ministerial servant, according to court papers.
Shumaker's lawyer, Michael Pate, declined to comment.
Assistant State's Attorney Kevin Barth, the prosecutor assigned to the case, also declined to comment.
County police charged Shumaker with repeatedly molesting one of the women and performing oral sex on another at his father's
house.
Shumaker, whose father is a longtime member of the congregation and is now an elder who oversees church matters, also is
accused of improperly touching a third woman.
"I would tell him that I was going to tell," one woman is quoted as telling police in a four-page statement of charges. "He would
twist my arm and tell me that no one would believe me, and that I liked it."
One of the women said in an interview Monday that when she and the others reported the abuse in the mid-1980s, the church's
all-male group of elders refused to believe them and banished them from the congregation.
All three women, who now range in age from 29 to 31, have quit the church, she said, after years of being ostracized by the
congregation and its members for making the allegations.
"They had this rule that you need a corroborating witness," the woman told the The (Baltimore) Sun. "How are you going to have
a witness to sex abuse? It was like no one wanted to believe us."
David Semonian, a spokesman for the church at its Brooklyn headquarters, said that when a member comes forward with an
accusation of abuse, two elders meet with the accuser and then with the accused to see if the complaint is valid.
"We do look for some corroborating evidence," he said. "The Bible directs that no single witness should rise up against any man."
Semonian said that he is unsure what policies the Jehovah's Witnesses followed when the women complained in the 1980s, but he
said the church has become "very aggressive" in protecting children from abuse.
LOAD-DATE: May 21, 2002