The Gananoque Reporter
Friday, October 2, 2015 5:21:56 EDT PM
By Wayne Lowrie, Gananoque Reporter
A handcuffed Brian Lucy is led from a police van to Brockville jail after being sentenced to five years in prison for indecent assault and gross indecency on Friday, October 2, 2015 in Brockvile, Ont. (Wayne Lowrie/Postmedia Network)
BROCKVILLE — A former church organist, who pleaded guilty to indecent assault and gross indecency on two youths more than three decades ago, was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday.
Brian Joseph Lucy, 67, of Gananoque also pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography for a stack of Polaroid pictures that he took of himself having sex with the main victim, a boy who was 13 at the time.
The incidents took place between January 1977 and January 1983 at Lucy’s home in Gananoque or in his car. There were two victims — one who had a six-year relationship with Lucy beginning when the boy was 13, and a second who had a single encounter with Lucy when the lad was 16 or 17. The victims can’t be identified by court order.
In recounting the facts of the case, which were agreed to by the defence, crown prosecutor Alan Findlay said Lucy was a prominent Gananoque citizen at the time, in his early 30s, an organist and pillar of the Catholic church, and a man of some wealth in comparison to his victims.
Lucy would find his main victim at the local video arcade and pay the boy $20 or $40 an encounter for anal and oral sex, which was big money for a poor kid in the 1970s, Findlay said.
Lucy repeatedly told the boy — then just entering puberty — that the boy was gay and would be an outcast in town if he ever told of the encounters, Findlay said.
In a victim impact statement that he read in court, the victim, now 51, said his shame and disgust at the encounters led to a lifetime of alcohol and drug abuse, constant rage, a criminal record, five stints in rehabilitation centres, a suicide attempt and continuing confusion about his sexuality.
At the age of 15, he was an alcoholic who kept a bottle of booze in his school locker. He attempted suicide once, “but I was too much of a coward to go through with it.” Instead, he slashed himself all over his body.
The victim said he used drugs and alcohol to dampen the feelings of shame and disgust. He remembered taking a three-hour bath after the first encounter with Lucy to “get the dirty feelings off of me.”
The victim said the encounters also affected his relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, which he stopped attending in 1979.
“I feel Brian Lucy is in league with Lucifer and is hiding behind the Catholic Church,” he said. “I feel betrayed by the Catholic Church.
The victim said the two-year court process leading up to Lucy’s guilty plea had affected him emotionally, forcing him to relive those years of abuse. He said he would be heading back into rehab after the sentencing.
“I wanted to be a criminal lawyer, but ended up a criminal,” he said.
In an impact statement filed with the court, the second victim said that he was overcome with shame and guilt and he has never forgiven himself for the encounter, for which he was paid $20. Those feelings led to years of drug and alcohol abuse, and it has been only recently that he managed to turn himself around.
In arguing for the five-year sentence, Findlay told Superior Court Justice John Johnston that Lucy used the victim “at a vulnerable age to satisfy his own selfish needs.”
Findlay said Lucy plied the boy with alcohol to lower his inhibitions, “so he could take advantage of a child to have sex with him.”
Lucy used his relative wealth to exploit two children to have his way with them, Findlay said.
The crime was made worse by the fact that Lucy video-recorded and took pictures of the sexual encounters and kept them for his own pleasure over the decades, Findlay said. (Gananoque police discovered the Polaroids during a search of Lucy’s condo in August 2013, but videotapes were never recovered.)
Findlay said the five-year sentence would send a message to the victims and the community that the victims have nothing to be ashamed of — the blame rests entirely with Lucy.
Lucy’s lawyer, Mark MacDonald, who agreed with the five-year sentence, said his client has no criminal record and that there is no evidence to indicate that he offended again after 1983. He noted that Lucy pleaded guilty, saving court time and the victims from having to testify in open court. (Lucy has gone through pretrial hearings, at which the main victim testified, but the testimony was not in public.)
His client — a soft-spoken, portly, balding man who wore a worn blue sweater to court — has health problems, MacDonald said. Lucy takes medication for heart trouble, he said.
In accepting the defence-prosecution recommendation of a five-year sentence, Johnston noted the significant impact that Lucy’s crimes had on his young victims.
The sentence is needed to “denounce this conduct — the sexual abuse of our children.”
Johnston said Lucy’s guilty plea worked in his favour.
“You have admitted to the community as a whole and to these two men that you, not they, are guilty,” the judge said.
Lucy received three years for indecent assault on his main victim, one year for gross indecency on his second, and one year for possession of child porn — the photos that he took.
Lucy, a lifelong resident of Gananoque, is the son of Grant W. Lucy, founder of the Gananoque Boat Lines, and he was the organist at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church on Stone Street from 1969 until 2013 when the charges were laid against him.
Lucy worked at low-income jobs for the later part of his life. His lawyer said that his only income now is his old-age pension.