A father will Tuesday, be sentenced for guilty pleas to child rape and related charges in a haunting case that experts call unusual because the perpetrator was an adoptive father and the victims were three boys in his care.
The pleas have all but ensured he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The 40-year-old man, whom The Associated Press isn't naming to protect the children's identities, said in an interview that he had been a foster parent, youth basketball coach and substitute teacher for years without any problems. He said he didn't adopt the boys with bad intentions.
"I always wanted to protect kids," he said during one of two interviews at the Miami County Jail. "Somewhere along the line, things went wrong."
In an era of stunning cases of sexual abuse of young boys by respected authority figures – priests, Boy Scout leaders, an assistant coach at a famed college football program – the repeated rapes of boys by an adoptive father who also arranged for two other men to rape one adopted son shocked his unsuspecting neighbors, investigators and children's services officials.
"It was just devastating to hear about. It's really sad for the kids," said April Long, a mother of three who was their next-door neighbor. She and other neighbors say they didn't suspect anything; the children played outside, and the man did neighborly things like pick up their mail or mow their lawn when they were away.
"You think: `What could I have done? Is there something we missed that we should have seen?'" Long said, gazing at the home from her front porch lined with children's bicycles.
The single man was a foster parent for six other children before he began adopting children in the past three years. He adopted a brother and sister and an unrelated boy, and was in the process of adopting another boy, all ages 9 to 12, when authorities arrested him a year ago Sunday following an undercover sting that began when a detective looked into an online posting about "taboo sex."
Ohio officials don't believe there has been a comparable case in the state in recent years, and media reports over the past five years show only a handful of reported cases nationally in which adoptive fathers sexually abused children in their care. Child abuse by adoptive fathers is much rarer than by biological fathers, or by other male relatives and non-relatives, federal studies have indicated.
"This isn't a typical situation. It certainly isn't typical of people seeking adoption," said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. "Most abusers of this sort have an interest in a child during a certain period of their development. They are looking for opportunities where they can get access to the kids. They don't want to have custodial responsibility."
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