Abuse in care: Survivor says abuser showed him corpse to silence him
Wednesday, 9 February 2022
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Fifty years after Donald Daniel Ku was sexually abused at the Marylands School in Christchurch, he still remembers the horrific details – how he was forced to strip naked, hit with a baseball bat if he didn’t comply, and sent to find other boys to bring to his abuser.
Ku, 58, testified before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care on Wednesday on the first day of the hearing into abuse relating to Catholic institutions in Christchurch.
Born in Raetihi in the North Island in 1963, Ku was labelled on his health records as “mentally retarded” and sent to Marylands just before his 10th birthday in 1973. He spent four years at the school.
Marylands School was run by the St John of God brothers from 1955 to 1984. It was a residential school for – according to language of the day – “mentally subnormal and delinquent” boys.
**READ MORE:
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**
Ku told the commission he had been at the school for about a year when Brother Bernard McGrath arrived and started overseeing the dormitory he was staying in. He said McGrath abused him and several other boys at Marylands.
“One time, he got a few of us boys into his room. We were all placed in a group on the floor without our clothes on, and we were kneeling,” Ku said in his written statement.
“Brother McGrath would go around us all with his penis out and try to put his penis in our mouths. Some of the other boys seemed to know what to do, but I didn’t. When he tried to shove his penis in my mouth, I bit him.”
He spoke about seeing McGrath sexually abuse other boys and engage in sexual acts with another brother at the school.
The boys were taken to a bach at Waikuku Beach that belonged to the St John of God Order, and were abused there.
“I remember being sent to find other boys to get abused by the brothers. I brought [one boy] into McGrath’s room and we were forced to watch McGrath masturbate in front of us.”
Ku also testified about the physical abuse he and others were subjected to. He told the inquiry of an incident when a boy, who walked with a limp, messed his bed and McGrath made him eat his own faeces in front of the other boys.
“McGrath would slap him across his face because he always moved so slowly. He used to hit [him] with his cross.”
Ku said McGrath once took him to the hospital morgue and showed him a corpse as a way of scaring him into maintaining his silence.
Steven James Long, 56, was admitted to Marylands on his sixth birthday. He was the youngest boy there.
He testified via video-link about the sexual and physical abuse he suffered at the hands of McGrath, saying he was an evil person hiding behind the black cloaks”.
“You sort of think you’re getting on alright with him and then in the evening somehow you’d be on his knee and he is touching himself underneath you. And then he gets you to come and pay him a visit at night after everybody has gone to sleep.”
Long told the inquiry about an incident when McGrath took him to the church where coffins were kept. McGrath told him he had to clean the coffins, and he had to be naked while doing so. Long was 7 or 8 years old at the time.
“He flipped me inside one of them and closed the lid.”
He said when McGrath opened the lid, he pulled him out by his hair and told him “this is where you’re going to end up”, before raping him.
Long said he was also sexually abused by Brother Roger Maloney. He had asked Maloney if he could have a few of the biscuits kept in a room where the brothers had their meals. Maloney sexually abused him before allowing him to have a few biscuits.
When Long turned 16 and was discharged from the care of Social Welfare, he started drinking and using drugs to “block out my bad memories” and ended up on the street. He committed burglaries and thefts to support his drug addiction and was in and out of prison for years.
He said when he was released from jail in 2010, he decided to turn his life around. He has not been back since.
McGrath and Maloney were later convicted of sexually abusing boys at Marylands. McGrath was also convicted for offending against young people at the Hebron Trust, a residential home for at-risk youth in Christchurch that was run by McGrath from 1986 to 1993.
Several other St John of God brothers were also accused of sexual abuse, but successfully fought extradition to New Zealand to stand trial on these charges.
The counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Katherine Anderson, said there was much more to “this dark chapter in New Zealand’s history” than what had been revealed through the criminal justice processes.
“Those criminal processes did not look at the order itself, nor could it establish a complete picture of the nature and extent of the criminal sexual offending by the St John of God brothers in Christchurch.”
Sally McKechnie, representing bishops and congregational leaders of the Catholic Church in Aotearoa, said in her opening statement two brothers of the St John of God remain in New Zealand, both in their mid-70s, retired and living in Christchurch.
Acknowledging the abuse that occurred, McKechnie said it was “deeply shameful to the Catholic Church and it should never have happened”.
She said the Catholic Church was being represented at the inquiry not to defend itself, but to reflect on past wrongs and what could be done to ensure it never happened again.
“No amount of good intention is ever going to overcome the extent of harm that those young people and children suffered at Marylands,” she said.
“The question we all must face, and the church itself turns to face is why – why was the harm caused at Marylands not identified, not prevented and not acted upon by the authorities, the brothers themselves, by the church.”
McGrath is currently serving a 33-year sentence in Australia and is likely to die in prison.
The hearing continues.