TOO FAT FOR JAIL

GUILTY TEACHER VICTIMS FURIOUS AS OBESE ABUSER SET TO AVOID PRISON

FORMER students from a Hobart Catholic college have expressed their disgust at news a convicted paedophile teacher will not be jailed for his crimes.

Peter John O’Neill is awaiting sentence after being pleading guilty to molesting six students at Dominic College in the 1980s.

But O’Neill, 61, is morbidly obese, wheelchairbound and considered too ill to travel from Canberra, where he now lives, and Chief Justice Alan Blow says he’s limited to imposing a fully suspended term of imprisonment.

FORMER Dominic College students are furious that paedophile teacher Peter John O’Neill won’t go to jail for molesting six students during the 1980s.

O’Neill, 61, is morbidly obese, wheelchair-bound and considered too ill to travel from Canberra — where he lives — to face justice in Hobart for his historical crimes.

He is due to be sentenced on August 25 by Chief Justice Alan Blow, who says he is limited to imposing a fullysuspended term of imprisonment after defence barrister Greg Barns SC said a medical charter aircraft to transport O’Neill would cost between $25,000 and $40,000.

That news has infuriated a group of ex-Dominic students, who say “he deserves to cop the punishment”.

“If he doesn’t go to jail and just dies quietly, he doesn’t deserve that,” Rachel Grguervic, who left Dominic in 1989, said. “I don’t get why these bastards get bloody protected all the time.”

Ms Grguervic said O’Neill wasn’t just a paedophile but also a physical and emotional abuser. “I was told I was fat and dumb, that I’d never amount to anything, no-one would ever love me. If you weren’t concentrating he would hit your fingers with a ruler,” she said.

“We were special ed classes and we were the weaker people, so he knew he could pick on us.

“Even if we cried, he’d say ‘oh you were nothing but a

AMBER WILSON

sook’. It was always degrading. He made one guy get up on a chair and take his shirt off because he was thin.”

Baden Daly, who left Dominic in 1991 said he suffered extensive abuse at the school at the hands of O’Neill.

The former ward of the state said he had a history of abuse before even attending Dominic, which O’Neill was aware of.

However, he said the teacher physically and emotionally retraumatised him — hitting him, putting him down, and keeping him back in detention for no reason.

“I’ve bottled it up,” Mr

Daly said.

“To end up with him as a teacher for him to do it all over again when I thought I was safe, it was traumatic. No wonder I didn’t learn anything.”

Mr Daly said he was now after justice “and a bit of closure”.

“I don’t think an apology really cuts it,” he said.

Other former students have taken to a Facebook group entitled Old Dominic Scholars to express their fury about O’Neill and other abusers at the school.

“I couldn’t care less how sick this filth is — his final days should be in jail,” one man said.

“Get a GoFundMe page going — I’ll donate $1000 to get this scum back where he should be.”

One woman said O’Neill deserved to feel “uncomfortable, unsafe, threatened” too.

“Nothing will give back what he took, but he must pay in some way.”

Another former student said she planned to write to Attorney-General Elise Archer and Chief Justice Blow about O’Neill escaping punishment.

“Those excuses are pathetic. Can’t he go to a jail in NSW?”

Another former Dominic College teacher, David Edwin Rapson, who is also a former Catholic priest, will be brought to Tasmania to face a number of historic indecent assault allegations.

Former Salesian order priest David Edwin Rapson, who taught at the Glenorchy school during the 1980s, has been charged with six counts of indecent assault.

The 67-year-old is due to return to the Supreme Court of Tasmania on October 26 for a directions hearing.