LANSING, MI (WKZO AM/FM) — Attorney General Dana Nessel is filing sexual assault charges against 5 priests, including one from Kalamazoo.
During a news conference in Lansing Friday morning Nessel announced a total of 21 counts of criminal sexual conduct against the men, 4 who have already been arrested and 1 that is being extradited back to Michigan from India.
That is 84-year-old Father Jacob Vellian who is charged with two counts of rape, which is a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Vellian, a former priest from the Catholic Diocese of Kalamazoo, once served as a priest at St. John Evangelist Parish in Benton Harbor, but apparently the allegations against him aren’t from that time.
The other 4 priests are 69-year-old Timothy Michael Crowley and 80-year-old Vicent DeLorenzo, both from the Lansing Diocese, and 63-year-old Neil Kalina and 55-year-old Patrick Casey from the Archdiocese of Detroit.
Nessel praised her investigative team but said that this is just the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to stopping individuals who abuse their power by victimizing our residents.
The counts were filed after they followed up on tips received on the Attorney General’s tip line (844-324-3374 or mi.gov/clergyabuse) and “scouring hundreds of thousands of pages of documents seized from Michigan’s seven dioceses in October,” according to Nessel’s release.
