Two lawsuits filed Wednesday allege a church and school in Volusia County failed to prevent young boys under its care from being sexually abused by an employee who had already been investigated by police for similar crimes.
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Richard Tripp, 31, and Camron Armstrong, 24, are separately suing the institutions they say were supposed to protect them from Matthew Clark Graziotti, who was sentenced in 2015 to 210 years in federal prison after sexually abusing 29 children under the age of 12 and using photo and video of the acts to create child pornography, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Both allege they were sexually abused as children by Graziotti, who served as a youth pastor at Edgewater Alliance Church in Edgewater, which Tripp attended, from around 2005 to 2014 and was also teacher at Armstrong’s school, Warner Christian Academy in South Daytona, the suits say.
Tripp’s suit against the church, filed in Orange County Circuit Court, seeks at least $25 million in damages, while Armstrong’s suit against the school, filed in Volusia County Circuit Court, seeks at least $15 million. Both are alleging negligence.
Tripp, speaking at a Wednesday news conference in Orlando, tearfully said he had suffered depression, substance abuse and even attempted suicide as a result of his trauma, and that he was coming forward now because he was “at the end of the line” and encouraged other sexual abuse victims to begin their healing process.
“I want to be better, and I want to find a way to bring light to this … just get the process started. It looks different for everybody,” he said. “It takes decades to just get the strength up to do the big fight … You can’t just walk around with it for your whole life and be embarrassed.”
Both are being represented by the Boca Raton-based Herman Law firm, which previously represented survivors of alleged sexual abuse by a priest who worked for the Catholic Diocese of Orlando.
Their attorney, Jenny Rossman, says the the suits center on the fact that the before he was hired by the church or school, the Edgewater Police Department had investigated Graziotti in 2004 for suspected sexual abuse of young boys. While he was not charged criminally, the probe led to him being terminated from his job as a youth minister at Friendship Community Church, also in Volusia County.
Rossman says this investigation and termination, along with other behaviors exhibited by Graziotti, meant that Edgewater Alliance Church and Warner Christian Academy, which separately hired him around 2005, knew or should have known he was a potential danger to children and should have taken steps to protect them from him.
“Both institutions gave Graziotti unfettered and unsupervised access to children anyway…they need to do very thorough background checks and then once somebody has passed that and is in the organization they need to not ignore these kind of red flag behaviors,” Rossman said.
Tripp began attending Edgewater Alliance Church around 2004, when he was about nine years old. Graziotti, once employed as a youth pastor, began grooming him by regularly complimenting him and other young boys in front of other church staff, the suit alleges.
Graziotti, as leader of the Tripp’s night youth group, would make comments about his sexual development and engaged in unwanted physical contact with him. During a mission trip for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, he isolated Tripp from the group, made sexually explicit comments to him about masturbation and would rub or massage his shoulders and chest.
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The abuse culminated around May 2008, when Graziotti took Tripp, then 12, from the church to his residence while the boy’s parents were on vacation. He then drugged and sexually battered Tripp, the suit says.
“It was someone my family trusted, someone I deeply trusted and looked up to. To every parent listening, look closely at the people who have access to your children because abuse happens in the exact places where you’re told to trust the most,” Tripp said at the Wednesday news conference.
Armstrong first met Graziotti at Warner Christian Academy’s summer camp, which the man directed, the summer before he entered the third grade. Later, during the 2013-2014 school year, when Armstrong was in the fifth grade and around 11 years old, Graziotti served as his teacher, the suit alleges.
Graziotti would groom Armstrong and other young boys by openly and “notoriously” tickling them on their sides, hips and stomachs in the classroom and elsewhere on school grounds. He also would openly enter the school restroom with children, unaccompanied, during school hours.
As director of the school’s summer camp program, Graziotti would have boys sit on his lap while playing video games, tell children he would take them home with him if their parents were late to pick them up and frequently took photographs of children in his care with his camera, the suit said.
While Armstrong was in the fifth grade, he would spend the night at Graziotti’s house on more than one occasion. During these stays, Graziotti would be given applesauce to eat, after which Armstrong would later wake up and feel groggy and disoriented.
The FBI investigation into Graziotti that led to his arrest sentencing found images on his electronic devices depicting him sexually battering Armstrong in his home, according to the lawsuit.
As to why the school should have known Graziotti was a danger to children, Rossman said Warner Christian Academy’s superintendent told the media at the time of Graziotti’s 2014 arrest on federal charges that the school had conducted a background check into him and found no indication of any problems or complaints.
She added that the school’s background check was either woefully insufficient and failed to investigate Graziotti’s previous termination from Friendship Community Church or that the school did investigate and ignored the termination.
As for the church, Rossman said that Graziotti’s brother-in-law, who had been the pastor at Friendship Community Church and had been the one to terminate him from his position there following the 2004 police investigation, spoke to Edgewater Alliance Church leadership about his concerns over Graziotti when they hired him around 2005.
She added that Graziotti’s sister also spoke to leadership at Edgewater Alliance Church about her own concerns involving her brother and young boys, including that he would have them sleep over at his home.
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