A former student at Bishop Guertin High School in Nashua can proceed in her sexual assault civil lawsuit against the school, after the New Hampshire Supreme Court overturneda lower court’s dismissal on grounds the statute on limitations had expired.
The alleged victim claims she was sexually assaulted on two different occasions by Shawn McEnany, an ordained brother who taught at the school. He died in 2017. The victim alleges in court documents that McEnany assaulted her twice in 1995, and that when she reported the incidents to both school leadership and her mother, she was disbelieved and told to keep quiet.
The plaintiff claims she learned in 2017 through an internet search that Bishop Guertin High School hired McEnany in 1990 despite knowing about a previous conviction for sexual assault of a minor at a Catholic school in Maine operated by the same Catholic order that ran Bishop Guertin. According to court documents, the school justified its hiring decision at the time by claiming that because Bishop Guertin was then an all-boys school, the student body was not in jeopardy from McEnany.
Bishop Guertin began accepting girls in 1992; the alleged victim attended the school from 1992 through 1996.
In 1997, McEnany was arrested in New Hampshire and charged with failing to register as a sex offender. Around that time, school leadership sent letters to parents acknowledging it was aware of his previous crimes when it hired him to teach.
But it wasn’t until 2017 that the victim in the case claims she learned through an internet search about the school’s admission, prompting her to file her civil lawsuit against Bishop Guertin and Brothers of the Sacred Heart of New England, the religious order that runs the high school.
The school asked Superior Court Judge Charles Temple to dismiss the case on grounds that the statute of limitations has expired on any possible civil claim. Under New Hampshire law, victims of this class of crime generally have until they are 30 years old to file a suit, or have three years after they discover the alleged crime took place.
Temple reasoned that the victim knew in the late 1990s about the details of the school’s hiring of McEnany, and she should have filed the lawsuit in a more timely fashion.
A unanimous Supreme Court, however, rejected that decision in an order released last week.
“Simply put, the plaintiff’s knowledge that she had been injured and that her assailant was employed by the defendants differs from her knowing of the causal connection between the injury and the defendants’ alleged acts or omissions in hiring, retaining, and supervising McEnany,” Justice Patrick Donovan wrote for the court.
The case will now return to the Superior Court for further proceedings.
Bishop Guertin High School didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
