As former Connecticut probation officer Richard Straub headed for a 15-year prison term, many of the men he had molested when they were his teenage clients thought they would be rid of the sexual predator who had changed their lives forever, the Hartford Courant reports in the second of a series. A year after he went to prison in 2000, Straub filed for bankruptcy and in the process publicly identified several of his victims as potential creditors. In a federal bankruptcy court, creditors and attorneys, including Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, carved up Straub’s finances – leaving little for the men he had molested as teenage boys.
State officials estimated the costs of keeping Straub in prison at more than $450,000. The state received about $98,000, far short of what it was seeking, but a lot more than any of Straub’s victims – a fact that has left many of them bitter at state officials. “It was more important for the state to get money for his incarceration than for his victims to get any money or any help, apparently,” said Marc Page, one of the victims. “Certainly nobody can claim that this was some great example of justice,” Blumenthal said. “This was a unique case in many ways. It involved the intersection of the state costs of incarcerating a prisoner, federal bankruptcy laws, an employee’s pension rights and victims of a crime.”
Link: http://www.courant.com/news/specials/hc-straub20414.artapr14,0,2310032.story