How Could You? Hall of Shame-NJ Firefighter case UPDATED

By on 10-04-2012 in Abuse in foster care, Helpings Hands, How could you? Hall of Shame, New Jersey, Roderick Knox

How Could You? Hall of Shame-NJ Firefighter case UPDATED

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Egg Harbor, New Jersey, foster parent and firefighter Roderick Knox, 47, was acquitted of 13 charges of sexually abusing his foster daughter in August 2010. She had only been in the house 3 weeks. The placement agency was Helping Hands.  He will go back to court on November 14, 2012 regarding a sex abuse charge stemming from a 1995 incident with another minor girl. That allegation was not part of this trial. His attorney is trying to get that charge dropped.

Background

” Authorities in southern New Jersey say an Atlantic City Fire Department captain sexually assaulted two underage girls in incidents that happened 15 years apart.

Roderick Knox was arrested Friday [February 19,2011]  night at work. The 44-year-old Egg Harbor Township resident faces sexual assault and child endangerment charges and was being held on $350,000 bail at the county jail.

Prosecutors say Knox committed various sex acts with a minor last August, and the victim reported the incidents to child welfare officials. A subsequent investigation by the prosecutor’s office uncovered another alleged victim who said she was assaulted in 1995.

It was not known Saturday if Knox had retained a lawyer. He could face up to 40 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

Fire department officials declined comment, citing the ongoing investigation.”

Atlantic City fire captain is arrested on charges of sexually assaulting 2 underage girls

[NJ. Com 2/19/11 by Associated Press]

“A suspended Atlantic City fire captain testified Tuesday that he never had a sexual relationship with the 15-year-old girl who lived in his home as a foster daughter for three weeks in August 2010, saying his accuser lied.

“Absolutely, positively not,” Roderick Knox told his attorney, Stephen Funk, when asked about the allegations. “I do not touch babies. Never. I treated her like I treat my daughters.”

Knox, 47, is on trial on charges of aggravated sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child and criminal sexual contact for allegedly having sex with the girl four times. He has been suspended from the Fire Department without pay for more than a year.

Testimony and arguments concluded Tuesday, and the jury will begin deliberations Wednesday on the 13 charges.

Knox on Tuesday told the jury it was the girl who crossed a line, saying she told him she was sexually attracted to him. Knox testified that he immediately told the girl that was inappropriate and he would notify her caseworker.

“I was appalled, stunned, shocked that a little girl would say such a thing,” Knox said as he was being cross-examined by Assistant Prosecutor John Flammer. Knox said he believed he had set boundaries with the girl.

“This is a little girl and she’s saying this to me,” Knox said.

Knox and his wife, Nicola Marie Knox, both said they were concerned when the girl told Knox she was sexually attracted to him.

Roderick Knox added the girl told him and his family she was a good actress and could make herself cry. “She said she’s very intelligent — she knows the system,” he said. “She told me she was a good liar and had lied before.”

Knox was unaware of the girl’s past behavioral problems until she was already living with them, he told the jury. While he said he had extensive foster parent training, he said he was not equipped to handle children with serious emotional or mental-health issues.

“Had I known her history,” Knox said, “she wouldn’t have been in my house.”

Knox testified the girl allegedly told him she was sexually attracted to him on Aug. 21, 2010. He said his wife wanted the girl out of the house. The couple tried to contact the girl’s case manager, Knox said, but she was out of town and did not respond to three messages and at least eight phone calls.

Flammer questioned Knox’s response and his written documentation, highlighting days where notes were not kept and other reports that stated the girl had no behavioral problems and was getting along well with the family.

As Flammer read one page of the documentation, Knox asked him to continue, saying, “I wrote more,” but Flammer stopped.

“Did you write anywhere in here that ‘Client said, “I’m sexually attracted and my wife wants her out of the house?”’” Flammer asked.

“No, I did not,” Knox said.

Knox said he and his wife decided the event was not an emergency and although they were reaching out to case managers, they also sought to re-establish boundaries.

When Nicola Marie Knox testified, she said that Sept. 1, 2010, was “the day (the girl) told me she was having sex with my husband.”

She said she didn’t believe the girl’s accusations, because the teen already had expressed inappropriate feelings for the man.

“You believed her,” Flammer said during cross-examination. “You comforted her.”

“As a matter of fact, I told her she was a liar,” Nicola Knox said.

The woman — also an Atlantic City firefighter — testified she never heard nor saw anything indicating an inappropriate relationship, even though she was home during some of the days the girl alleged she had sex. Could Nicola Marie Knox have been unaware?

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Not unless I was brain-dead or oblivious to the whole situation, which you can see I’m neither of those.”

Knox confirmed that when her husband told her that the girl expressed inappropriate feelings for him on Aug. 21, 2010, she wanted the girl out of the house. The Knoxes instead decided to contact the girl’s caseworker, and Nicola Marie Knox warned her husband not to be alone with the girl.

There were two other times the man and teen traveled alone.

In a taped statement the woman gave investigators, she said a family friend’s birthday party “was the only day I allowed my husband to take her out.”

“That wasn’t true, was it?” Flammer asked.

The two also went to a luau sponsored by Helping Hands, the organization that placed the girl.

It was a mandatory meeting, the woman replied. And she was at work.

In his closing statements, defense attorney Funk attacked the girl’s story as implausible. “I submit to you now … that the state’s case was an abuse of logic.”

He highlighted what he considered to be holes in the prosecution’s case regarding where the girl said she was taken to have sex, the lack of DNA evidence from where they allegedly had sex, Knox’s character witnesses and the girl’s acknowledgement of behavioral problems.

“So you decide who to believe,” Funk said in his 42-minute closing. “The troubled girl institutionalized with behavior problems including dishonesty, or everyone else involved in the case.”

In his closing statements, Flammer described the case as an abuse of trust and characterized Knox as having “the facade of being a good, caring foster parent.”

“She’s not lying,” Flammer repeatedly said, pointing to DNA evidence taken from her breast that the defense had said came as a result of a sneeze. He described the other alleged encounters as “stolen moments” and said the girl was courageous to come forward.” [I wish the reporters would have explained the DNA evidence better.]

Suspended Atlantic City firefighter testifies he did not have sex with foster daughter

[Press of Atlantic City 10/3/12 by Derek Harper, Sarah Watson, Lynda Cohen]

The charges included counts of “aggravated sexual assault, criminal sexual contact and child endangerment. ”

Jury to get Atlantic City firefighter sex case

[6ABC.com 10/3/12 by Associated Press]

He was acquitted by the jury in less than 2 hours.

“The Egg Harbor Township man remains charged in a separate incident that allegedly occurred with a minor in 1995 and was discovered while the more recent allegation was being investigated. The jury was not informed of that case.

“It was the most hideous thing you could be accused of,” Knox said of the charges he was just cleared of outside the courtroom after the verdict. “I can’t stand people that do stuff like that.”

He testified it was the girl — whose name is not being published due to the nature of the charges — who expressed a sexual attraction to him and that she made up the stories because he told her he had to report her inappropriate thoughts to her caseworker.

“He’s been very, very strong in knowing that the truth would come out,” friend Fareed Abdullah said.

Knox put his head in his hands and wept after the verdict was read.

“Free, free, free,” he repeated as he hugged family members inside the courtroom.

“God,” Knox said outside court. “That’s what got me through.”

He will be back in court Nov. 14, when Superior Court Judge Bernard DeLury will hear a motion to have the pending charges from 1995 dismissed. Until that happens, Knox remains suspended from his job without pay.

The Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office went back that far because they wanted to add to the charges to force him to take a plea, Knox said outside the courtroom Wednesday.

He happily stood with defense attorney Stephen Funk.

“If he didn’t believe in me, he would not have been able to defend my case the way he did,” Knox said.

“To me, this shows we’re not in Salem (Mass.) in the 1600s any more,” Funk said. “You can’t have a troubled girl make accusations and have an impartial jury just go along with it. That’s comforting.”

Less than an hour into their discussions, jurors asked for copies of texts Knox’s eldest daughter, Amber, sent to her mother along with logs Knox testified to keeping about incidents with the alleged victim, who lived in his Egg Harbor Township house about three weeks.

DeLury told the jurors none of that had been admitted into evidence, so instead they spent about an hour watching video of testimony Amber Knox, now 19, gave that included mentions of those texts.

On Sept. 1, 2010, Amber, her sister and father returned home to find that the alleged victim had told Knox’s current wife, Nicola Marie, that the two were having sex and was no longer in the house. Amber testified the girl made the same allegations to her the night before.

While her father and “Miss Marie” discussed it, Amber ran from the home.

“Mommy, it all came out,” Amber texted. “Daddy was having sex with (his foster daughter) and he went back in her room last night when I was up all night. I can’t take this.”

The text meant that the accuser was alleging the sex happened, not that Amber saw it, the teen testified. She said she was running while texting, so her thoughts may not have been clear.

Amber testified that the girl told her there would be a sexual encounter that night and had Amber promise to leave her bedroom door open so she would hear. But Amber said that she heard nothing but her father snoring when she went by his bedroom on the way to the bathroom.

She didn’t get any sleep that night, Amber said. But she never heard anything, including music, which the alleged victim said was played during the encounter in Knox’s bedroom.

Assistant Prosecutor John Flammer asked Amber if the reason she was upset was because she believed the allegations.

“If it was a lie, there would be no reason to be upset,” he said.

“That’s not true,” Amber replied. “It was too much for me to handle to hear this about your father.”

Less than an hour after rewatching the testimony, the jury reached its verdict.”

Atlantic City fire captain found not guilty of having sex with foster daughter

[Press of Atlantic City 10/3/12 by  Lynda Cohen]

REFORM Puzzle Pieces

 

Update:”An Atlantic City fire captain suspended more than two years while he went through two criminal trials is set to get nearly a quarter-million dollars in back pay following his second acquittal.

Roderick Knox, 47, could be awarded even more money as there is possible litigation in as many as three civil lawsuits, including a suit that has not yet been filed that would claim the criminal charges never would have come if the Division of Child Protection and Permanency had disclosed certain information about the alleged victim it placed in Knox’s home for foster care.

Knox, who lives in Egg Harbor Township, was suspended without pay in February 2011, after he was arrested at Fire Station 5 on charges he sexually assaulted two teenage girls 15 years apart. He was acquitted last year of having sex with his then-15-year-old foster daughter in 2010. Then, in February, a jury found him not guilty of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1995. That alleged victim — now 30 — was found during the investigation into the newer case.

Now that Knox has been reinstated as a fire captain, City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday to pay him the $248,538 he is owed for the time he was out of work. That includes the $115,901 annual salary he was making as a captain, and his 2012 salary, which brought a 4 percent raise for firefighters.

“The city has acknowledged they owe him the back pay, that just needs to go through council,” said Stephen Funk, Knox’s attorney in both criminal trials. “He’s officially back on the job but took some time off to be with his family.”

The money does not add to the city’s expenses, as Knox’s salary was already accounted for in the budget, according to Michael Stinson, director of Revenue and Finance

But that total is “a little light,” said Sebastian Ionno, who is representing Knox in at least one civil case. “But we’ll take that up in the city suit.

That suit alleging racial discrimination in the city’s Fire Department was pending when Knox was charged in 2011. It originally named Fire Chief Dennis Brooks and now-retired Deputy Chief Robert Palamaro, but both have been dropped as defendants, with only the city named, Ionno said.

The two, however, could be ordered to give depositions and possibly testify at trial.

The suit alleges Knox was discriminated against because he is black, and then received disciplinary charges in retaliation for those complaints. Those disciplinary claims — which include charges that Knox falsified documents — are pending before the Office of Administrative Law, Ionno said. No monetary claim has yet been made in the suit.

“We are in initial discussions about possibly going to mediation (in that case),” Ionno said.

Ionno said he also plans to file a suit against the Division of Child Protection and Permanency — formerly DYFS — for withholding information he claims could have avoided the criminal charges.

Knox was originally accused of having sex with the foster daughter the division placed with his family. But Ionno says the girl’s history should have been disclosed, and showed she “should not have been placed in a home with a man.”

A tort claim was also filed on Knox’s behalf warning that he could sue the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office. A tort claim is not a lawsuit, and only warns that one could be filed. That claim is not being handled by Ionno, and details were not immediately available.

But, in a letter Knox gave to a Press of Atlantic City reporter right after the jury verdict in February, he claimed that the investigator in the case was “hell bent on convicting me, an innocent man, for personal reasons I believe are associated with the Fire Department, who I have a lawsuit against.”

He alleged that the department’s “vendetta” included failure to respond to a records request he made that would have aided his defense. Knox said he was told those records didn’t exist, but that the state was given documents from the same time period.”

[Press of Atlantic City 4/9/13 by Lydia Cohen]

One Comment

  1. How could a man with 2 separate counts of sexual predicence of children be excused or exhorted, sometgng is wrong with that picture, just you wait its all gonna come to the lightlmmr Knox u know God knows and those children know. How can u live with urself…

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