Family’s plea for closure
Jail push for pedophile
SIMON* died by suicide last year, more than 30 years after he was molested by Dominic College teacher Peter John O’Neill.
He never got to see his abuser sent to jail.
And now, since the morbidly obese and wheelchairbound pedophile has not been brought back to Tasmania to face justice, Simon’s family is unlikely to get closure either.
Simon’s brother is one of the 1666 people who, as of Friday afternoon, has signed a change.org petition calling on the state government to foot a potentially mammoth bill to extradite O’Neill from Canberra via a medical aircraft.
Simon’s brother said his sibling had finally come forward to police about 2015 after years of struggling through life.
“He pursued this Peter John O’Neill with all his might,” the man said. “He said I just want to stop this guy from doing anything to anyone else.”
But he said the case dragged on for years. “My brother said he was extremely frustrated that it had taken so long to bring justice,” the man said.
Then finally last year, the man said his brother’s struggles finally overcame him.
“In the final few weeks I could tell that something was wrong and I could tell that something dark was happenA ing,” he said. The man said it was “completely inadequate” O’Neill had not been extradited from Canberra to serve a custodial sentence in Tasmania.
On Thursday, Labor’s Ella Haddad grilled Attorney-General Elise Archer in parliament about why the government hadn’t paid to extradite O’Neill.
“What do you say to O’Neill’s victims and families who are furious that a cost has been put on their suffering?’’ she said.
“Will you intervene to make arrangements for Mr O’Neill to be brought back to Tasmania to serve his sentence?”
Ms Archer replied that she would not intervene in an independent decision by the courts.
Ms Haddad said she wasn’t asking the government to intervene in a decision of the courts, but simply provide funding so O’Neill could serve a court-imposed sentence.
O’Neill was last week handed a five-year fully suspended jail sentence for molesting six children during the 1980s while he was a teacher at Dominic College, St Virgil’s College and Burnie High School. O’Neill’s victims and their supporters are calling on Tasmania’s Director of Public Prosecutions to appeal the sentence.
*A pseudonym has been used to protect the victim’s identity.