Fells Acres : Kin of victims `very angry' at recommendation

Despite the Parole Board's doubts about whether justice was served by Gerald "Tooky" Amirault's long years in prison, the people who say they were victimized by him, his sister and his late mother still insist he belongs behind bars.

"I want him to stay there as long as he possibly can," said the mother of a 22-year-old woman who was among the children that testified against the Amiraults. She and her husband urged acting Gov. Jane Swift to cast a hard eye on Amirault's commutation papers as they cross her desk.

"I only hope that she (Swift) thinks long and hard. If he gets paroled, I hope he's out with a lot of rules. . . . I just hope she (Swift) makes a well-thought-out decision that considers the safety of the kids," the mother said.

"It terrifies me he may be out, that he may hurt someone again," she said. Her daughter, who now has children of her own, reacted with both fear and anger to the news of the Parole Board's decision yesterday, she said.
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Last September, the Parole Board heard from several Fells Acres children, all now in their 20s, as the board considered Amirault's request for commutation.

"Let me tell you one thing. I did not lie," said one victim, a woman in her 20s who was a toddler when the alleged child-abuse nightmare unfolded at the Fells Acres Day School in the mid-1980s. "How could we (the victims) all come up with the same stories if we were not molested by monsters?"

The mother of an alleged victim told the Parole Board, "They (victims) have not been able to heal because they have been portrayed as liars in the media. They know vast numbers of people don't believe them, and that causes a great deal of turmoil for them because these abusers (the Amiraults) told them nobody would believe them."

While Tooky Amirault's family received news of the Parole Board's decision with unbridled joy, the victims' families said it was another stunning blow to them.
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