Abuse trial begins for ex-Delco day care center owner

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2020

WEST CHESTER » The former owner of a southern Chester County day care center is on trial in Common Pleas Court this week for allegedly sexually molesting three young girls at the home-based facility he ran with his wife, crimes that authorities contend occurred more than a decade ago.

“They have grown up, but they have lived their whole lives with these memories,” said Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien in her opening address Wednesday to the jury of eight men and four women in Judge Jeffrey Somer’s courtroom, referring to those children who were allegedly molested. The girls, who were 3 and 4 years old when they attended the day care, are now teenagers.

Charged is James Anthony Battista, 71, of Upper Darby, who operated the Little Friends Daycare in Penn, outside West Grove, until it closed in 2010 because of news about a state police investigation into accusations of abuse there.

Battista was not arrested until March 2019, when the third of the girls came forward and kickstarted the investigation that had been put on hold by state police in 2009 after the investigator looking into the accusations hit a dead end, O’Brien said.

Battista, known as “Mr. Jim” to those who attended the day care center, is charged with aggravated indecent assault, indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, and endangering the welfare of children. The assaults would allegedly take place during “nap time” at the center, when Battista’s wife, Eleanor, was away on errands, and the other children were asleep.

“These are things that happened in the dark, behind closed doors, without witnesses,” said

O’Brien, of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit.

But Battista’s attorney, Charles Peruto Jr. of Philadelphia, told the jury that his client was innocent of the charges — not because someone else was guilty but because nothing had happened.

“This isn’t a case where some other dude did it,” Peruto said in his opening. “No crime was committed by anybody.” He suggested that the charges were filed after the children were coached and manipulated by police and their parents to fabricate stories about what had happened to them. “What these kids are saying did not happen.”

Of Battista and his wife, Peruto said their lives had been “ruined” because of the accusations. “They have been convicted in the court of public opinion because of the rumors that flew around them,” the veteran criminal defense attorney said.

According to court documents and O’Brien’s opening, state police Corporal Stefano Gallina reopened the investigation in 2018 that had begun at the Avondale barracks by then-Trooper James Ciliberto in 2008, after Gallina received a report of a child being sexually abused at the in-home day care run by Battista from 2006 to 2009.

That child told investigators that she had been at the day care enter when she was ages 4 to 7, and that while she was there, Battista would touch her inappropriately “almost every day,” according to a criminal complaint. She said that Battista told her not to tell anyone or she would get in trouble.

Ciliberto’s investigation had involved two other girls who were also 4 years old, whose parents said they had told them about the abuse at Battista’s hands. One of those women testified on Wednesday that she had been reluctant to approach the police about what her daughter had said, because she trusted Battista and his wife and did not want to get them into trouble.

According to O’Brien in her opening, Ciliberto had made the “difficult decision” not to charge Battista in 2009 because he did not think the girls, then under 5-years-old, would be able to handle testifying in open court. He was concerned, O’Brien said, that their memories would fade over the years and charges would never be brought against Battista, but “it was just too much for them” to testify back then.

But O’Brien said that when the third girl came forward and Gallina decided to reopen the case, the first girl who had complained was quick to recall what she said Battista had done.

“People thought she had forgotten, but she never had,” O’Brien told the panel.

All three of the girls are expected to testify during the trial, which may run into next week.