Ricky Windmann wasn’t nervous when he accompanied janitor Peter Modica to his ground-floor maintenance office at Jesuit High School on an otherwise unremarkable day in the late 1970s.
After all, Modica – a former semipro baseball player – had let the skinny, light-haired boy play basketball on the school’s grounds several times, even though he wasn’t a student. He also bought Windmann a bike and stopped by the boy’s house, which was a couple blocks from the school’s Mid-City campus, to meet Windmann’s mother.
But any feeling of safety was replaced by paralyzing fear when Modica suddenly pulled Windmann’s pants down and forcibly performed oral sex on him. Windmann doesn’t recall his exact age at the time, but he said he believes he was in his early teens.
The janitor would go on to sexually abuse the adolescent several more times in the ensuing years – once in concert with a Jesuit priest and teacher, Neil Carr – only stopping when Windmann grew big enough to protect himself.
Six years ago, Jesuit’s leadership paid Windmann $450,000 to settle his abuse claim. The agreement came on the heels of the school’s settling two other sets of abuse claims from the same era involving Donald Dickerson, a Jesuit scholastic, and religious brother Claude Ory, according to interviews and records obtained by The Advocate.
Jesuit High sex abuse settlements kept quiet; 1 victim speaks out for first time | News | theadvocate.com
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