beneath a steel sky cant tell joey to go to room

It was easier for accusers in general to come forward, and easier for people to believe their stories, even if the stories sounded too awful to be true. By that time sexual abuse scandals had ripped through the Catholic Church, shattering the silence that had for so long protected its secrets. I watched the deposition - all 19 hours of grainy, scratchy videotape - more than two decades later.

6, 1996, as part of a remarkable group of lawsuits that 28 former residents brought against the nuns, the diocese, and the social agency that oversaw the orphanage. She recounted his fall in a deposition on Nov. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, did not always have a clear sense of their age - birthdays, like siblings and even names, being one of the many human attributes that were stripped from them when they passed through its doors. Girls usually moved when they were 6, though residents of St. Sally figured the boy fell from the window in 1944 or so, because she was moving to the “big girls” dormitory that day. We are going to have to do something about you, child. The nun told her she had a vivid imagination. Sister took hold of Sally’s ear, turned her around, and walked her back to the other side of the yard. In a tone that was still completely bewildered, she recalled asking, Sister? There were only two people in the yard, she said: Sally herself and a nun who was escorting her. She straightened her arms out in front of her. “That habit thing, whatever it is, that they wear, stuck out like a sore thumb.”Ī nun was standing at the window, Sally said. “The first thing I saw was looking up, hearing the crash of the window, and then him going down, but my eyes were still glued-.” She pointed up at where the broken window would have been and then she pointed at her own face and drew circles around it. Sally, who was speaking under oath, tried to explain it. “Well, I guess you’d call it - it was a bounce,” she replied.

“Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.įor just a moment, the room was still. “He kind of hit, and- ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

Beneath a steel sky cant tell joey to go to room