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Saturday, March 15, 2025

Founder of Haitian orphanage convicted for sexually abusing boys in his care

by

Newsdesk
19 days ago
20250224

The Unit­ed States De­part­ment of Jus­tice (DOJ) says a man who found­ed a home for im­pov­er­ished chil­dren in Haiti, is sched­uled to be sen­tenced on May 5 and faces a max­i­mum penal­ty of 30 years in prison on each of the sev­en to­tal counts of sex­u­al­ly abus­ing boys at the fa­cil­i­ty.

“This case was brought as part of Project Safe Child­hood, a na­tion­wide ini­tia­tive to com­bat the epi­dem­ic of child sex­u­al ex­ploita­tion and abuse launched in May 2006 by the De­part­ment of Jus­tice,” the DOJ said.

It said that a fed­er­al ju­ry in Mi­a­mi has con­vict­ed Michael Karl Geilen­feld, 73, from Col­orado for sex­u­al­ly abus­ing nu­mer­ous boys at the or­phan­age he found­ed and di­rect­ed in Haiti.

The DOJ said that based on court doc­u­ments and ev­i­dence pre­sent­ed at tri­al, Geilen­feld found­ed St. Joseph’s Home for Boys, a home for or­phaned, im­pov­er­ished, and oth­er­wise vul­ner­a­ble chil­dren in Haiti, in 1985 and op­er­at­ed it for more than two decades.

“Geilen­feld re­peat­ed­ly trav­eled from the Unit­ed States to Haiti, where he sex­u­al­ly abused the boys en­trust­ed to his care,” the DOJ said.”

The DOJ said the ju­ry last Thurs­day con­vict­ed Geilen­feld of one count of trav­el­ing in for­eign com­merce for the pur­pose of en­gag­ing in il­lic­it sex­u­al con­duct and six counts of en­gag­ing in il­lic­it sex­u­al con­duct in a for­eign place, be­tween 2005 and 2010.

Each of the six counts of en­gag­ing in il­lic­it sex­u­al con­duct in a for­eign place re­lates to a par­tic­u­lar vic­tim who was a child at the time of the of­fense.

The DOJ said each of the six vic­tims tes­ti­fied about the sex­u­al abuse they suf­fered at the hands of Geilen­feld, as did four oth­er vic­tims who were not the sub­ject of the charged of­fens­es.

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