A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm).

Un longform pubblicato su BuzzFeedNews racconta la storia, venuta a galla negli anni ’90, dei maltrattamenti e degli abusi sessuali che tra gli anni ’30 e ’70 del secolo scorso sarebbero stati perpetrati ai danni degli orfani ospitati presso l’orfanotrofio cattolico di St. Joseph a Burlington, nel Vermont. Secondo le deposizioni raccolte, come quella di Sally Dale, alcune suore che gestivano la struttura si sarebbero perfino macchiate del reato di omicidio.

It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

“He kind of hit, and— ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.

For just a moment, the room was still. “Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. “Well, I guess you’d call it — it was a bounce,” she replied. “And then he laid still.”

Sally, who was speaking under oath, tried to explain it. She started again. “The first thing I saw was looking up, hearing the crash of the window, and then him going down, but my eyes were still glued—.” She pointed up at where the broken window would have been and then she pointed at her own face and drew circles around it. “That habit thing, whatever it is, that they wear, stuck out like a sore thumb.”

A nun was standing at the window, Sally said. She straightened her arms out in front of her. “But her hands were like that.”

There were only two people in the yard, she said: Sally herself and a nun who was escorting her. In a tone that was still completely bewildered, she recalled asking, Sister?

Sister took hold of Sally’s ear, turned her around, and walked her back to the other side of the yard. The nun told her she had a vivid imagination. We are going to have to do something about you, child.

Immagine da Wikimedia.