Betrayal by The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe

drop-in center — before he was promoted to pastor of St. Ann's in Gloucester in 1985. His last assignment before his death was at St. Brigid's in Lexington. He also served as juvenile-court chaplain at Brighton Municipal Court, and he frequently took teenage parishioners on out-of-state held trips; in his suit, Hogan alleges that Birmingham abused him during ski trips to Vermont and an eighth-grade trip to Arizona, Nevada, and California.
    “What I know now is that I should have gone to the police,” said McGee. “But I thought I'd go to the Church and I thought the Church would take care of it.”
    The air snapped with the chilly bite of late fall and the sun had barely begun to rise when Rev. Ronald H. Paquin roused the four teenage boys from their alcohol-soaked sleep and piled them in his Lincoln Continental for the long drive home.
    The thirty-nine-year-old priest and his young companions, who ranged from thirteen to sixteen, were still drowsy, and they could feel the groggy aftereffects of the previous night. All five had stayed up drinking until one or two in the morning, so the predawn wakeup that cold morning on November 28, 1981, was an unwelcome jolt to their systems. Nevertheless, they wanted to get an early start back to Haverhill, a blue-collar community north of Boston, where Paquin was a curate at St. John the Baptist, the same parish where the four teenagers — James Francis, Joseph Bresnahan, Joseph Vaillancourt, and Christopher Hatch — served as altar boys.
    Paquin had arranged the weekend outing at a private chalet in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, supposedly to reward the boys for their work launching a parish youth group. They originally planned to spend only one evening at the house, but because the boys had enjoyed the trip so much, Paquin later told a reporter, they decided to slay Friday night as well. More than two decades later, it remains unclear what Paquin had in mind when he crawled into Jimmy Francis's sleeping bag on one of those evenings, as one of the other boys saw him do, and how Jimmy reacted when he found the priest next to him in his bedding.
    They are questions Francis never had a chance to answer. Tired from the night of drinking, Paquin fell asleep at the wheel twice on the ride home. The second time Paquin nodded off, on a stretch of highway on Interstate 93 in Tilton, New Hampshire, Francis grabbed the wheel in a futile attempt to keep the car from going off the road, according to one of the other boys. The heavy car rolled over, throwing Francis out of the vehicle and pinning him beneath the wreckage. Another of the four boys was seriously injured. Paquin and the remaining two escaped with minor injuries. Trapped under the car, Francis — a junior at Haverhill High School, an honor student, and an athlete — died of asphyxiation.
    The fatal auto accident, which cost Harold and Sheila Francis their only son, resulted in no criminal charges. And twenty-one years later, Paquin insists he was sober when he lost control of the car, despite the account of one of the other boys, now a grown man, who described the night of drinking.
    Had the archdiocese removed Paquin from the priesthood the first time it received a complaint about his behavior, it is unlikely that jimmy Francis would have died on that New Hampshire highway.
    Three years earlier, Robert P. Bartlett had complained to the pastor at St. Monica's in nearby Methuen, where Paquin was then assigned, that the priest had molested him and two other teenage boys. But Paquin was transferred to Haverhill in 1981 anyway, and it took the Boston archdiocese nine more years to remove him from there, a decision that came only after Church officials were told he had molested more children in Haverhill.
    Sheila and Harold Francis filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Boston archdiocese in April 2002 after learning from newspaper accounts that the archdiocese had known that Paquin had allegedly molested children before transferring