Former Tulsa priest charged with sexual assault
A former Catholic priest who served in the Tulsa Diocese has been charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old-boy in a suburban Chicago hotel in 2001 after police reopened an investigation that had been dormant for more than a decade.
Kenneth Lewis of Arvada, Colorado, is charged with felony criminal predatory sexual assault, the Associated Press reported Monday. Lewis posted bail after a court hearing in Chicago on Saturday, the AP reported.
Ryan Glew, police commander in Evanston, Illinois, said the boy’s family reported in 2004 that the alleged assault occurred when the then-priest accompanied the boy and his family on a trip from Tulsa to Evanston.
Tuesday, Dave Crenshaw with the Tulsa Diocese’s communications office said an investigation into the alleged incident in Chicago was conducted by the diocese in 2001 at the request of the Most Rev. Edward Slattery, then bishop of the Tulsa Diocese. Slattery is now the diocese’s bishop emeritus.
Crenshaw said Slattery relieved Lewis of his priestly duties in the diocese in July 2002 and asked that the Vatican begin the process to have the clergyman “laicized,” which he said is the Church’s formal process to remove someone from the priesthood. Crenshaw said that process was completed in 2007.
According to published reports, Slattery placed Lewis on administrative leave in 2002 due to allegations that the priest had sexually molested youths at St. Mary’s in Tulsa.
According to news reports, Lewis had also been the subject of other allegations of improprieties with youths in the 1990s. The Tulsa County district attorney declined to file criminal charges against the priest in 2001, saying that he thought the statute of limitations precluded him from prosecuting anyone because of a law in effect in the mid-1990s — when most of the acts were alleged to have taken place. That law called for prosecution “no later than five years after the discovery of the alleged crime.”
According to news reports, Lewis was assigned to churches in Fairfax, Hominy and Cleveland from 1996 to 2001. From June 2001 to his removal from priestly duties, Lewis served churches in McAlester, Krebs, Eufaula and Pittsburg.
At his own news conference in 2002, Lewis denied wrongdoing.
CONTRIBUTING: Religion Editor Carla Hinton