BOSTON — A former Roman Catholic priest who was indicted in Maine on 29 counts of sexual misconduct dating to the 1980s was arrested in Boston.
Boston police and U.S. Marshals took 74-year-old Ronald Paquin into custody Wednesday near a hospital in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, according to a Boston Globe report.
Paquin previously spent more than a decade in a Massachusetts prison for raping an altar boy. He was defrocked in 2004. He is now accused of abusing two boys in Kennebunkport between 1985 and 1989. Prosecutors say some of the counts involve a child under age 14.
Paquin is expected to appear in a Massachusetts court on Friday, where he is charged as a fugitive. A message was left with an attorney who represented him.
The indictments against Paquin were handed down Tuesday by a York County grand jury.
Paquin pleaded guilty in 2002 to repeatedly raping a Haverhill, Massachusetts, altar boy from 1989 to 1992. The rapes began when the boy was 12.
Paquin was removed from the priesthood in 2002, and was jailed on the rape charges from 2002 until 2015.
Kennebunkport Police Chief Craig A. Sanford said the Maine cases were referred to his department by the state Attorney General’s Office, which was approached by one of the alleged victims in 2011.
Sanford said the acts reportedly occurred at a “seasonal location.”
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