Friday, November 20, 2009 East Central Illinois

Inquiry over interviews continues in Jon White case

By: Mary Schenk

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Thursday, October 25, 2007 03:28:21 PM CDT

URBANA – Lawyers for accused sex molester Jon White continued to question Department of Children and Family Service investigators Wednesday about how they conducted interviews with girls who were students of White at Thomas Paine Elementary School in Urbana.

Their hope is that Champaign County Judge Harry Clem will find the statements of the nine girls unreliable and therefore not something a jury can hear.

White, 26, of Normal, is charged with predatory criminal sexual assault of a child and aggravated criminal sexual abuse for sex acts he is accused of committing with the girls, ages 7 and 8, between August 2005 and December 2006 while he was a teacher at the grade school.

Child protection investigators Heather Forrest, Janis Caffrey and Sheree Foley, all of whom have been with DCFS at least nine years, were on the stand Wednesday, the second of three or four days of expected hearings on pretrial motions.

Still to be heard are motions seeking to change the place of trial; whether file names suggestive of child pornography found on White's home computer might be introduced; and whether the jury will hear about similar charges White faces in McLean County for sex acts allegedly committed with two girls when he was a teacher at a Normal grade school in 2004 and 2005.

Forrest conducted forensic interviews with five of the girls named as victims in the Champaign County charges; Foley did two and Caffrey did one. A ninth girl who was living in Florida was interviewed later.

The women explained that they typically ask open-ended, non-leading questions of children who are suspected of having been abused.

"Our purpose was just to find out what the children knew, if anything happened to them and what services they might need," Foley testified.

All the investigators heard from the girls about a "tasting game" that White conducted with them using a banana while at the school, both during lunch periods and after school.

At least one of the girls had been interviewed about that by now-retired District 116 Human Resources Director Carmelita Thomas before the allegations of sex abuse came to the attention of Urbana police on Jan. 29.

Under questioning by White's attorneys Brett Olmstead and Carol Dison, each of the DCFS interviewers acknowledged that it was important to know, before they conducted their interviews, how many times a child had been questioned previously about the incidents.

The investigators said some of the children had been questioned by parents; others had no idea why they were being interviewed at the Child Advocacy Center in Urbana. The interviews of eight of the girls occurred in a five-day period between Jan. 29 and Feb. 2, before any publicity about White's arrest.

Referring to transcripts of the recorded interviews of the girls, Olmstead was able to get Foley to admit that in a few instances she asked leading questions of one of the girls she interviewed, a technique she defended as necessary to help her understand what had happened.

Before the start of the hearings Monday, Clem had already watched the interviews.

Still to come will be testimony from the parents who talked to their children about the acts.

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