SPLIT DECISION
U.D. MAN ACQUITTED OF CHILD SEX ABUSE, BUT CONVICTED OF ENDANGERING CHILDREN
WEST CHESTER » A Common Pleas Court jury hearing the case of a former owner of family day care center in southern Chester County delivered a split verdict on charges that he sexually molested three young girls at the facility more than a decade ago.
After deliberating for almost seven hours on Friday, the panel of eight men and four women acquitted Delaware County resident James Anthony Battista on one count of aggravated indecent assault, a firstdegree felony and the most serious charge against him. The jury returned to Judge Jeffrey Sommer’s courtroom around
10:30 p.m.
It also found Battista, who had testified that he had never behaved inappropriately with the three girls, all of whom were under 5 years old at the time, when they were under his care in 2009, not guilty on two counts each of indecent assault and unlawful contact with a minor. Those charges related to the two oldest of the three girls.
But the jury found Battista,
71, of Upper Darby, guilty of three counts of felony endangering the welfare of children, a crime punishable by a maximum of 3 ½ to seven years in state prison. Sentencing guidelines will most likely recommended a lesser penalty, since Battista has no prior criminal record.
Finally, the panel told Sommer that they had been unable to reach a unanimous verdict on the charges of indecent assault and unlawful contact with a minor relating to the youngest of the three girls. It will be up to the District Attorney’s office to decide whether to retry Battista on those charges.
Sommer, who presided over the three-day trial, will sentence Battista at a later date. He remains free on bail.
All three girls took the stand during the trial to tell the jury what they said they remembered about being abused by Battista while they were in his care at the Little Friends Day Care in Penn, outside West Grove, in 2009. They are all in their teens now — ages 19, 16, and 14.
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“What the defendant did to these children is every parent’s nightmare,” said Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit during her closing argument on Friday.
“But this was not a dream,” for the children, she said. “This was not their imag ination. These are memories that they have never escaped. That they will never escape.” She asked the panel not to let Battista escape responsibility because of the passage of time since the alleged incidents.
“He can’t get away with it now, because they are bigger and stronger and braver,” O’Brien said.
But in his summation to the jury, defense attorney Charles Peruto Jr. repeated the contention from his opening statement that the crimes Battista was accused of never occurred.
“We said from the beginning that no crime has been committed,” Peruto said. He maintained that the prosecution had kept the case alive unfairly when charges should have been brought when the children first made their accusations.
The case, he said, was driven by parents who spread false information about his client over the years, even though he remained a well-regarded figure in the community — even to the girls themselves. “They all loved him,” Peruto said. “The only thing you have in this case that is common is that they all loved ‘Mr. Jim,’” referring to Battista by his nickname.
One of the jurors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the panel had worked hard to reach a unanimous verdict on all the counts, but in the end could not.
“It was a really, really difficult case for the commonwealth, and ver y dif ficult to rise to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt,” the juror said. “This was not easy. People had their positions, and we were talking together throughout” deliberations.
“I can say that this was the most respectful and considerate group of people I’ve ever been with, but in the end, nobody was going to go home feeling food.”
The case against Battista traveled a long path. He first came under investigation by state police at Avondale in 2009 when the mother of the oldest girl told an investigator that her 4-year-old daughter described being molested by him on several occasions when she went to daycare at Little Friends. A second girl reported the alleged abuse to Trooper James Ciliberto, not an investigator with the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit, after telling her grandmother what had happened to her.
The daycare closed in 2010 because of the news in the community about the state police investigation into the accusations of abuse there.
Battista was not arrested, however, until March 2019, when the third girl came forward and kick-started the investigation that had been put on hold after the investigator looking into the accusations hit a dead end, fearing the two girls who had come forward would not be able to testify in open court. The third girl had kept the details of the alleged abuse a secret for years, until finally telling a family friend who passed the information along to her parents.
The girls eventually all told state police investigator Trooper Stefano Gallina that Battista would routinely fondle them in a private room during their scheduled nap time, when his wife was out of the house on errands. He told one of the girls that she should not reveal what had happened between them or else she would get in trouble.
O’Brien was assisted in the case by Assistant District Attorney Stefanie Friedman.
“What the defendant did to these children is every parent’s nightmare. But this was not a dream. This was not their imagination. These are memories that they have never escaped. That they will never escape.”
— Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit during her closing argument