The lawyers Javier Pipkin and Eddy Méndez ask the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) to set the hearing to close the civil lawsuit for sexual abuse suffered by a student at the hands of a teacher at the Campo Alegre School (ECA), an institution located in the Las Mercedes urbanization, Baruta municipality, Miranda state.
Pipkin and Méndez spoke on behalf of the victim, who was 12 years old at the time of the incident. The case is related to practices of mass pedophilia by William James Vahey, an American educator who worked at the ECA from where he held a “spring break”, which stipulated traveling to Central American countries during each Holy Week.
The hearing in the Social Chamber has been suspended twice for various reasons, explained attorney Méndez, who recalled that this act was scheduled for July 28 and September 29 last.
Called
“The call we make to the Social Chamber is to fulfill its commitment to justice, to Venezuelan society; An exemplary sentence is needed in this case, no one is above the law”, declared Méndez, while warning about the perverse effects that pedophilia causes against children and their family group.
“We need the Social Chamber to set a date soon for the final hearing, justice must be expedited; this is a case with an exaggerated procedural delay”, she limited.
Méndez pointed out that the Lopnna trials are designed to last less than a year and the present one is already going for eight years.
Chronology of events
The events occurred in 2009 during a trip to Costa Rica with students from the Campo Alegre School, where William James Vahey attended as a teacher sent by the institution. The subject worked in that private school between 2002 and 2009.
Modus operandi: Vahey went through the rooms where the students were staying and offered them cookies filled with cream previously mixed with powerful sleeping pills. And it was there when she took advantage of them to do any kind of abuse. In addition, he took pictures of them, which were collected on a personal flash drive, according to investigations.
In 2014, William James Vahey lives in Managua, Nicaragua, where he works in a school similar to the Campo Alegre School. A maid discovered the flash drive and looked at the photos of the drugged students. The domestic delivered the storage device to the director of the school where Vahey taught classes, who called her to explain the situation. Vahey admitted to his boss that he did abuse those students, a situation that he had been practicing since 1972 in the various schools where he was teaching, spread over four continents.
The director of the American Nicaraguan School handed over the flash drive to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which had an office in the United States embassy located in Managua. As a result, the FBI published a warning poster cataloging Vahey as “the most prolific pedophile in history.”
In May of that same 2014, FBI experts traveled to Venezuela and met with parents of 30 students from the Campo Alegre School to officially inform them that this group of students were considered victims of sexual abuse.
In December 2014, one of the 30 boys abused by Vahey filed a lawsuit with the Lopnna courts in Caracas. To the plaintiffs’ surprise, those courts did not find the Campo Alegre School responsible and dismissed the lawsuit.
In October 2021, the Social Chamber of the TSJ received the lawsuit file from the 3rd Superior Court for the Protection of Children and Adolescents of Caracas.
A month later, in November 2021, the legal representatives of the victim formalized the appeal before the Social Chamber by means of which they request that justice be done and that the Campo Alegre School be declared responsible for the non-pecuniary damage for being the institution that hired to William James Vahey.
In March of this year, the Social Chamber admitted the participation of the Ombudsman in the trial.
Then, in July, the Social Chamber declared the substantiation of the cassation appeal (appeal) concluded, “consequently, the case enters the state of hearing fixation,” says the sentence.
That same month, the Social Chamber of the TSJ set for July 28 the final hearing of the claim for non-pecuniary damage. But, 16 hours after it was held, the hearing was suspended.
Finally, in September, the Social Chamber rescheduled the hearing for September 29, at 9 am. However, a few hours later it was suspended again, without having been summoned to date.
