The allegations against Jones and the Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation in Spokane are detailed in a lawsuit filed in August by Terril and Enholm. InvestigateWest typically doesn’t identify alleged victims of sexual assault, but several victims decided to speak out publicly for this article in the hope of holding the church accountable for its history of silence. InvestigateWest’s attempts to reach him for this story were unsuccessful. Jones, now 72, has since been released from prison. “It could have been prevented if somebody had called the police ,” Enholm tells InvestigateWest. Jones abused at least two more children in the following decades, court records show, before spending 16 years in a California prison for continual sexual abuse of a child under 14. Still, they say, church officials never alerted police. In the years after that, more boys came forward saying Jones sexually abused them, according to Terril and Enholm. Again, the other church leaders failed to act, allowing Jones to be around the boys, the lawsuit says. The church allowed the alleged abuser, John Earl Jones, to continue spending time with Terril, and he molested the boy for years after, court documents say.Īround the same time, the mother of another boy in the congregation, Daniel Enholm, reported to the church that Jones had touched her son too. Police weren’t notified, he says, nor were his parents. Instead, the church leader got angry and told Terril they could do nothing about it without a second witness, Terril says.
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