Bradley Asbury is led away in handcuffs after being convicted of holding down a 14-year-old boy in a staircase as two other youth counselors raped him in the 1990s at the former Youth Development Center.
A jury found a former Youth Development Center house leader guilty Tuesday of holding down a 14-year-old boy in a staircase as two other youth counselors raped him in the 1990s.
Bradley Asbury, 69, who had been out on bail, was handcuffed by a court officer and taken into custody at Hillsborough County Superior Court in Manchester after each member of the jury, seven women and five men, were polled to make sure the decision was unanimous. He is set to be sentenced by Judge Will Delker on Jan. 27.
The verdict came around 2 p.m. after the jury deliberated over the course of three days starting Friday morning.
Asbury stood with his eyes closed as the foreman read the two guilty verdicts on aggravated felonious sexual assault (accomplice). Asbury is the second of eight former workers to face trial after a sweeping investigation into abuse at the former juvenile detention facility in the 1990s and 2000s, and the first to be found guilty.
Asbury showed little emotion as he looked over at family and friends while being taken into custody two days before Thanksgiving.
Sitting in the back row, the victim, Michael Gilpatrick, 41, held the hand of his wife and placed his head down on the back of the gallery benches after the verdict. He was surrounded by about a half-dozen friends and family.
“God is good,” said Gilpatrick, who testified during the trial.
Gilpatrick left the courtroom giving a fist-bump. Later, while walking hand-in-hand with his wife, Kelly, he said he was instructed not to speak, although he shared a few words.
‘It’s about time’
“God is good and the truth prevailed,” he said. “I was believed. It’s about time.”
Mike Gilpatrick, leaving the court with his wife, Kelly Gilpatrick, said “God is good.”
(The Union Leader doesn’t routinely identify victims of sex crimes, but Gilpatrick had gone public with his allegations.)
Prosecutor Adam Woods said he would not comment on anything specific that happened during the trial as other cases proceed, including an exchange between Gilpatrick and Asbury’s lawyer, David Rothstein, where Gilpatrick called Rothstein a “sick man” during cross-examination and left the stand, asking for a break.
“We are grateful that they considered all of the victim’s testimony and arrived at this verdict,” Woods said.
Rothstein left the courtroom without comment.
The prosecution argued Asbury and three other staffers carried Gilpatrick to a staircase landing where he was raped and he was told to perform other sex acts.
The three other staffers — Jeffrey Buskey, Stephen Murphy and James Woodlock — also face criminal trials.
“He (Asbury) was the house leader. He was the final say. He was the man who ran the whole show and he was the muscle holding Mike’s arm back to make Murphy and Buskey’s crime possible,” Woods said during his closing argument.
Jury selection is set to begin in a case against Murphy on Jan. 6.
Throughout the trial, Rothstein argued Gilpatrick was motivated by money in filing a lawsuit against the state.
“Mike Gilpatrick falsely accused Brad Asbury of a crime that he not only didn’t commit, but which in every shape and form was impossible to commit,” Rothstein said in his closing argument.
Gilpatrick’s was the second of more than 1,000 lawsuits filed alleging abuse at YDC over the course of decades.
The first criminal trial against a former YDC worker — Victor Malavet, who faces 12 charges of aggravated felonious sexual assault for incidents that allegedly took place between June and November 2001 in Merrimack — ended in a mistrial in September after the jury deadlocked. A dispositional hearing has been scheduled for Dec. 19.
