Music teacher trial accused of sexual abuse stir painful memories

A courtroom can become a kind of time machine.

Paul Geer’s criminal trial, a former music teacher, was held in a federal court in Albany, New York, last week. But the testimony and photographic evidence transported everyone to the 1990s and early 2000s to a city to 125 miles away, Hancock, and the Campus isolated from the School of the Family Foundation in the Forest.

The Reform School is closed for a long time and has established several demands by the former students who accuse Mr. Geer of sexual abuse for decades. But the trial returned the place to the public care center.

There is a photo of a large basement lined with bunk beds. The students slept there, under Mr. Geer’s house. There is the barn, where he kept practice for his young singers.

The middle -aged men and women sat in the witness post and asked the same question: “Do you see Paul Geer here today?”

They scanned the room, resting their eyes into the robust, bald man and glasses hunched over the defense table. Some knew him when he was 20 or 30 years old. Now he is 57 years old.

Everyone pointed out, he.

They were asked about how they terrified them, or worse, decades ago, when they were teenagers.

In 2024, Mr. Geer was accused of six positions related to bringing three children through state lines to participate in sexual activities. The case led to a trial that began on February 19.

On Friday, closing arguments took place. Around a dozen alumni who had never known before, after attending school in different periods, observed in the gallery. The jury began to deliberate shortly after.

During the past week, witnesses were shown photographs of the place that many have tried to forget. Their names have been written from public records in the case, but several have submitted in interviews and demands.

“This is the isolation room where I had to stay for five days,” said a former student, Elizabeth Boysick, 41, looking at an image of a small room without windows. “It’s very difficult to see. No one should be treated like this. Especially children. “

The school was founded in the 1980s by Tony and Betty Argiros, a couple who had fought with addiction and built the place in the principles of anonymous alcoholics and their 12 -step program. The parents of the counties and surrounding states sent their problematic children to the small campus, announced as a “therapeutic internship”, in the foothills of the Catskills.

Upon arrival, the children were examined in front of other students, and an adult observed while rubbing the lice shampoo in their hair and genitals in a shower, according to the testimony. They were assigned to a “family”, with staff members who play the role of parents.

Mr. Geer, who taught at school from the early 90s until he closed in 2014, was the “father” of the six family. Students were openly described as a sex addict that hit the bottom of the rock while driving one day and almost crashed while masturbating, the alumni testified. “This constant and return story,” said Steve Zahoroiko, 43, a former student and, later, a Marine. “That was the brilliant moment in his life, when everything changed.”

He forced students to admit that they impure thoughts and actions in front of their new family. “Talk about any sexual life that we supposedly had,” said Zahoroiko.

Mr. Geer was repeatedly described as flying to an anger to confront a student. “To be shouted by him very close to my face,” Mrs. Boysick testified. “The red face, sweating.”

Other students remembered being forced to run in place all day (“jog”, or transport rock cubes through a hill as punishment.

Prosecutors called several alumni who said Mr. Geer sexually abused them. A 39 -year -old man identified as “victim 3” testified that Mr. Geer had forced him to join the choir: “He was not a singer” and that the teacher had abused him from a school trip to Toronto, in a hotel room. The prosecutors showed videos of their song in the choir, a younger Mr. Geer who strongly directed the group.

“I never thought I would be here in the witness post talking about this, never again,” the former student testified. “But he was the devil.”

Mike Milia, 46, another former student, testified that Geer took him to a fishing and tourism trip to Maine for several days in 1994, when he was 15 years old. His parents did not know about the trip. The prosecutors showed photographs of the smiling teenager posing before the road signals: “Brake for Moose”.

“We never put a fishing cane in the water,” Milia testified. Instead, Mr. Geer bought beer and pornographic magazines and sexually abused the teenager for days, he testified.

Mr. Geer’s lawyers with the Federal Office of Public Defenders sought to soften the bad representation of man and school. A former administrator, Emmanuel “Mike” Argiros, a son of the founders, declared that he had never heard complaints about Mr. Geer who abused children, and who had sent three of his own children to school, partly for his excellent music program.

The alumni faced with smiling photographs of the yearbook of their teenage beings, combined with brilliant testimonies about their time there. Mr. Zahoroiko, the old Marine, laughed in the witness post and said that the students did not write those blurs; The school did it.

The defense lawyers have raised inconsistencies in the versions of the students’ events over the years, in FBI interviews and elsewhere. Elizabeth Ianelli, a former student and organizer of the first public attacks against the school, wrote a memory of her time there, “I see you, survivor”, published in 2023.

But he was called as a defense witness on Wednesday, and lawyers increased contradictions between what he had written and what he testified.

At all times, Mr. Geer observed in silence, occasionally making a grimace of apparent physical pain and seemed to have difficulty getting up from his chair when the jurors entered or left the courtroom.

Lauren Lacroix, 34, flew to Albany from San Diego, where he lives with her husband and young children, to see the trial. He had tried to put his time at school behind her. Now, he found comfort in meeting other alumni.

“There is no explanation,” he said. “They get it immediately.”

Upon hearing abuse accounts, he thought of a member of the female staff who had set it shortly after his arrival at school. “She said: ‘I never love you just with Paul Geer,” Lacroix recalled.

On Monday, after an afternoon and a morning after deliberations, the jurors returned with their verdict.

Guilty of the two positions involving the singer of the choir in Toronto.

Guilty of the two positions for Mr. Milia on the road trip to Maine.

But the jurors could not reach a verdict on the counts related to Mrs. Boysick, the only account without photographs to document their time with Mr. Geer.

For those at the audience, Mr. Geer seemed to break the emotion in the verdict. He was taken to handcuffs, to remain in jail until his sentence in July.

Mrs. Boysick, who was among the first students to present publicly, using her name in a lawsuit, felt claim, not loss, in the verdict, despite the result of the positions that involved her.

“I will totally own those guilt verdicts,” he said. “It would not have happened if it weren’t for me.”

She said that moments before the verdict, Mr. Geer looked at her: “Open, pure fear, what is about to happen to me?” She said.

It was a feeling that Mrs. Boysick and her old classmates in the gallery once knew well.