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Pedophile exposed at local church
The Portland Foursquare Church sacrificed its children to maintain the illusion of a pristine reputation
by Renée LaChance
^
hortly after the Rev. Thomas Baker be­
gan working for the Portland Foursquare
Church in 1989, he became aware that
Raymond Milas was sexually molest­
ing young children.
An 11-year-old girl came to Baker at the
urging of her mother and told him that Milas had
touched a young boy “like he shouldn’t have.”
Baker phoned the boy’s father and informed him
o f the report. The boy’s father told Baker that
there had been a problem in the past but he was
taking care of it. When asked later, Baker could
not remember anything about the nature of this
problem except the word “sucked.” When asked
if he realized that some sort of oral sodomy took
place between Milas and the youth, he said,
“I remember the word, and to follow the logic, I
don’t know what else it would be.”
The father said that there had been no further
problem after that, and Baker let the incident
slide. Baker said he felt it had been handled
sufficiently by the abused boy’s family, and he
was not worried about other children at the church.
He did not check to see what activities Milas was
involved in at the church, and he did not notify any
church staff or volunteers of the incident. He did
with a trip to Mexico that he was facilitating with
not question Milas about the incident or instruct
a high school youth group. He did not want to
him to stay away from children at the church.
have this incident involving Milas blow up while
This incident was not the first time M ilas’s sex
he was out of town, so he instructed Richardson to
crimes had been reported to a pastor at the Port­
wait until he got back from Mexico, two weeks
land Foursquare Church. Two years earlier, the
later, before reporting the incident to the parents
Rev. Alan Hamilton heard a rumor that Milas had
of the boys or to the police. Baker instructed
sodomized a 5-year-old member of the church.
Richardson to keep Milas away from the kids and
Like Baker, Hamilton contacted the boy’s father,
out of the Heritage Building where the Sonbeams
who confirmed the rumor and told Hamilton that
group met.
he was taking care o f i t The abuse did not take
In the days that followed it became apparent
place on the church premises, so Hamilton did not
that pedophilia at the Portland Foursquare Church
feel a need to report it to other staff or volunteers.
was a bigger problem than Baker had thought. In
He also did not instruct Milas to stay away from
the midst of Baker’s trip to Mexico he received a
church activities involving children, nor did he
phone call from an underling saying that they just
offer him any counseling.
couldn’t wait any longer to report the abuse, so
Baker acquiesced.
Neither Hamilton nor Baker reported the inci­
dent to any agency or police department as re­
Detective A1 Smith of the Portland Police
quired by the Oregon Child Abuse Reporting Act.
Bureau was assigned to the case. When he took
In fact, it wasn’t until Baker became aware in June
Milas in for questioning, Milas confessed to sexu­
1990 o f a number of incidents of sexual abuse
ally molesting and sodomizing seven boys aged
involving Milas and 4- to 8-year-old boys that he
4 to 8. Subsequently, Milas was charged with 35
asked legal counsel about his duty to report
counts o f sodomy and sexual abuse. He pled
By then it had become impossible to deny any
guilty to 13 counts in exchange for the state
longer that there was a problem.
dropping the remaining 22 counts against him.
On a Wednesday evening in June 1990, John
Milas has admitted to abusing two to three times
Richardson, supervisor o f the Son beams, a group
that number of boys, but the police were unable to
identify them. Milas was sentenced to 20 years
for 4- and 5-year-olds that met on Wednesday
and instructed to pay $10,000 in restitution to four
evenings, pulled Baker from a class. Richardson
of the victims.
indicated to Baker that there was a problem of a
“I was the only parent at Ray’s sentencing,”
sexual nature with Milas.
said Lisa Smithey. “ Ray was begging not to be
Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney
sent to prison. I had tears in my eyes. I really felt
Charlene Woods, who handled M ilas’s trial, said
that two other people should have been hand­
that a church worker had entered a restroom at the
cuffed and sent to prison with him: Pastor A1
church and overheard Milas and a young boy in a
Hamilton and Pastor Tom Baker. When I was
conversation that intimated sexual abuse. The
pregnant
with my son and going to the Portland
conversation disturbed the church worker, who
Foursquare Church, they knew about Ray. This
immediately reported the incident to Richardson.
never should have happened.”
Baker called Milas into his office, and Milas
Smithey had been a member of the Portland
confessed that he had molested the boy.
Foursquare Church most of her life. After her son
Baker also learned that Milas was giving an­
was bom, she involved him in the church’s activi­
other young boy a ride to a babysitter that night,
ties. Smilhey’s son was one of M ilas’s victims.
so he insisted on riding along. The significant
She filed a lawsuit against the Portland Four­
outcome of that car ride was that the boy com­
square Church in May 1991 holding the church
mented to Baker about how different the ride
and pastors Baker and Hamilton responsible for
home was, because when Milas had driven him to
the abuse. After the story was published in Just
the church they both had had their pants down.
Out and mentioned in Phil Stanford’s column in
What a dilemma for Baker! Now he had the
The Oregonian, the Portland Foursquare Church
knowledge that Milas was currently sexually mo­
settled the lawsuit out o f court on Oct. 19,1992,
lesting at least two boys from his church and that
just hours before the trial was to begin.
he had molested another boy from the church a
Settling the lawsuit put an end to the two-year
year before, and yet Baker made no effort to
ordeal
that Smithey had endured while suing the
contact the boys’ parents or to report the incidents
church. No amount o f time will fully heal her
to an authority. In fact, Baker didn’teven consider
young son from the effects of the abuse.
reporting the abuse; Richardson was the one who
Smithey first realized that something was
said, “We have got to report this."
wrong when her son refused to go to the
Baker wouldn't do that. He was preoccupied
S
babysitter’s. At night he began wetting his bed
and woke with nightmares. Smithey began to take
her son to work with her, and finally she had to
quit her job in order to stay at home with him.
“My life was a mess,” remembered Smithey.
“I had no money. I lost my house. I lost my car.
Suing the Foursquare Church was the last thing I
wanted to do, but it saved my life. I am aChristian,
I believe in God and I wanted to do the right thing
for my son.”
Like the traditional dysfunctional family, the
Portland Foursquare Church turned on Smithey
when news of her lawsuit became known. Baker
spoke from the pulpit about Smithey’s lawsuit
and encouraged prayer chains for her.
“Other church members said I was just out for
the money,” recalled Smithey. “It really hurt my
feelings when members of the church accused me
of being vindictive and said I was doing the
devil’s work.” Pastor Baker spoke with Smithey
a number of times during the course of the lawsuit
and encouraged her to let the church counsel her
son. He told her that her son was young and that
“he’ll get over it.”
“I don’t know how he can say my son is not
affected by this,” said Smithey. “He is still having
nightmares. My son says when Ray gets out of
prison he’s going to take a rope and tie [Milas’s]
feet and watch him walk. My oldest son says he’s
going to kill Ray. My whole family is devastated
by this.”
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I really felt that
two other people
should have been
handcuffed and
sent to prison with
him [Ray Milas]:
Al Hamilton and
Tom Baker.
Lisa Smithey, mother of victim
Two years after Smithey’s son was molested
by Milas, the symptoms persist. On a routine visit
to the doctor, her son, who is now 6 years old,
became traumatized when the physician attempted
to stick a tongue depressor in his mouth. He has
nightmares about being raped, and people in his
dreams are always out to get him. He asks his
mom if someone is going to hurt his younger sister
and “touch her private parts, too.”
“This never should have happened. It never
should have happened to any of the boys. I wasn’t
being vindictive by filing the lawsuit; I just
wanted the truth to get out. And an apology,” said
a disillusioned Smithey. “I want other parents to
know what may have happened to their kids. By
settling out of court the truth isn’t getting out and
I still haven’t gotten an apology. I wanted to go to
court, but Jill encouraged me to take the settle­
ment.”
Jill Otey is Smithey’s attorney. A former deputy
district attorney, Otey dedicates herself to helping
victims of child sexual abuse. She hopes tochange
people, to educate people and to rid society of the
social ill of child abuse. Her current soapbox is
making institutions aware of the Oregon Child
Abuse Reporting Act.
“We have got to stop institutions from allow­
ing abuse to happen within their own four walls,”
said an impassioned Otey. “That was what this
case was about. That is where the Foursquare
Church fell sh o rt”
The International Foursquare Church is the
parent church of the Portland Foursquare Church.
The church has no training programs to teach
clergy, staff or volunteers how to recognize sexual
abuse, nor do they have a program to teach clergy
the statutory requirements in their stales about
reporting abuse to authorities.
“It is unbelievable that a pastor would not
know about the Child Abuse Reporting Act,” said
Otey. “The statute is very comprehensive in ex­
plaining who is responsible to report abuse.
“Public and private individuals who are re­
quired to report include physicians, dentists, law­
yers, school employees, nurses, human resource
employees, juvenile department employees, po­
lice officers, clergy, psychologists, social work­
ers, day care, foster care, chiropractors, natu­
ropaths, youth group leaders and more. A person
cannot be sued civilly for inaccurately making a
report. The law errs on the side of children. And
that is how it should be. This was totally ignored
by the Portland Foursquare Church,” said Otey.
“If Hamilton or Baker had reported the abuse
when it first happened, not only would a number
of those kids have been spared, but Ray could
have had an opportunity for counseling and reha­
bilitation,” said Otey. “Ray was an abused kid
himself. Now you have this 26-year-old man
sitting in prison for 20 years.
“What happened there never should have hap­
pened,” Otey continued. “It was grossly negligent
on the part of the Foursquare Church. Perhaps it
was coincidental, but I saw this church harboring
the Oregon Citizens Alliance. They rented rooms
to them and supplied them with names and fos­
tered their message, and yet, at the very exact
same time, they were hiding pedophilia within
their own four walls. They were trying to label
people within our society as equivalent to
pedophiles in our state constitution, yet they were
hiding it and covering it up within die church.”
When Phil Stanford wrote about the lawsuit in
his column in The Oregonian, a reader wrote to
chastise him for writing about this case in the
midst o f the battle over Ballot Measure 9. That
response illustrates that people still don’t under­
stand that same-sex pedophilia is not homosexu­
ality. Pedophilia is violence against children; it is
abuse. Committing violence against children has
nothing to do with a person’s sexual orientation,
yet the OCA and the Portland Foursquare Church
fed the fires of hate surrounding Ballot Measure 9
with that misinformation. Some people who sup­
ported a “no” vote on Ballot Measure 9, like
Stanford, still believe that same-sex pedophiles
are also gay.
“ Ray was a pedophile,” said Otey. “ He chose
little boys, making him a same-sex pedophile, not
ahomosexual. He never had an adult relationship
in his life with either a man or a woman.”
It would seem prudent for the Foursquare
Church to educate its members, clergy and
children’s services staff about the symptoms of
child abuse (sexual, physical and emotional) and
about the laws requiring the reporting o f such
abuse to the proper authorities. Baker admitted
negligence in complying with the Oregon Child
Abuse Reporting Act in his deposition with Otey.
By doing so, he has risked losing his job. Pastors
of the International Foursquare Church can have
their ministerial standing revoked for “willful or
negligent failure to comply with governmental
regulations.”
If we can make institutions more aware of the
problem of abuse, maybe we can stop the tide o f
child abuse that is sweeping this nation.