Anthony Odiong after his arrest in Florida on 16 July 2024. Photograph: Couresty of Waco police View image in fullscreen Anthony Odiong after his arrest in Florida on 16 July 2024. Photograph: Couresty of Waco police New Orleans clergy abuse Catholic priest given life sentence for sexual assault in Texas found to have neglected daughter Child of Anthony Odiong, born in 2023, did not have car seat while cleric spent $20,000 on phone calls from jail
Prefer the Guardian on Google A Roman Catholic priest who was sentenced in June to life imprisonment for criminal clergy sexual assault in Texas was making a Louisiana parishioner with whom he had a daughter raise their child “as a single mother”, according to the prosecutors on his case.
Anthony Odiong’s daughter, born in 2023, and her mother “were living without the support a [biological] father would normally provide” even before authorities successfully pursued a case leading to his conviction on charges that he exploited his status as a clergyman to sexually assault two other women, Ryan Calvert and Liz Buice of the McLennan county district attorney’s office wrote in a lengthy article in the September-October issue of the Texas Prosecutor journal.
Perhaps the most striking indication of Odiong’s treatment of his daughter – whom he fathered despite having made the standard clerical promise of sexual celibacy – and her mother was the fact that investigators noticed the girl lacked “a proper car seat”, Calvert and Buice wrote.
She finally got one because police detectives Bradley DeLange and Zach Koenig in Waco, Texas, joined victim assistance coordinator Melissa Beseda to buy one with their own money, according to the article.
Meanwhile, Calvert and Buice wrote, there was evidence establishing that Odiong, 58, had spent more than $20,000 just on telephone calls while in jail in the roughly two years that he awaited the outcome of the case against him in custody.
Odiong’s daughter’s mother, identified in court proceedings by the pseudonym Presley Jones, nonetheless eluded authorities’ attempts to get her to testify against him at his trial. Calvert and Buice said she apologized after Odiong’s conviction and “emotionally thanked” them for holding him accountable “with obvious relief” in her voice.
View image in fullscreen Anthony Odiong in a photograph entered into evidence in his trial. Photograph: Courtesy of district attorney of McLennan county, Texas The Texas Prosecutor article served as a postscript of sorts to the Odiong case, a rare instance of a cleric being held criminally liable for illegally using his religious office to sexually abuse adults. It also provided the most details yet of how Odiong fathered a child with one of his congregants in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana, where he had been the pastor of St Anthony of Padua church beginning in 2015 after a prior stint working in the Waco area.
As Calvert and Buice put it in their article, titled “Faith was his weapon”, Jones told investigators that Odiong first kissed her as she confessed her sins to him at church. “Things progressed to a sexual relationship, and Presley became pregnant, giving birth to their daughter in 2023” initially in secret, the prosecutors wrote.
The detectives who later investigated Odiong realized that his cellphone contained pictures of him wearing his priestly vestments and baptizing his own daughter into the Catholic faith, with Jones and other members of her family looking on.
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