Bay Area pastors, church workers on once-secret Southern Baptist sex abuse list
TAMPA, Fla. - Southern Baptist leaders on Thursday released a previously secret list of hundreds of church officials and workers they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors.
The public list comes nearly 15 years after victims first began demanding that church leaders keep records of known and accused sexual abusers.
The 205-page list of names includes hundreds of men and women from across the country who have either been convicted of, arrested for, or admitted to abusing children while serving in the church.
Nearly a dozen entries include pastors, youth ministers, and other church workers who have Bay Area ties. Among them are two men who were able to move on to new roles in new Baptist churches after facing child sexual abuse-related charges elsewhere.
Marshal Seymour and Matthew Christopher Porter were both arrested on child sex abuse charges while working with the church. After serving their sentences both were able to move to new states, gain positions inside new Baptist churches, and abuse new victims.
Seymour pleaded guilty to third-degree assault charges while working as a youth minister in Alabama in 1999. After his release from jail, he was able to join Lakeland's First Baptist Church at the Mall as a volunteer youth minister. It was there in 2007 that he was arrested for and convicted of sexually assaulting three teenage boys.
In 2008, former Bradenton youth minister Matthew Christopher Porter was busted for secretly recording teens as they changed. He was later brought on as a chaplain in a Texas nursing home where, in 2011, he was once again arrested for setting up cameras inside bathrooms and charged with video voyeurism.
Randy Morrow, a former youth pastor at Countryside Baptist Church in Clearwater was sentenced to 135 years for sexually abusing three teenage boys in 2000.
Former youth pastors Dan Allmond of Tampa Baptist Church (1998), Kenneth Baxley of Central Baptist Community Ministries in Lakeland (2001), Samuel Sutter of Openwater Church in Odessa (2016), and Scott Wright of the Crossing Church in Tampa (2009) were all charged with having sex with minors.
According to the list, Robert Alexander, then a deacon at the First Baptist Church in Tampa, was arrested in 1999 and subsequently sentenced to 21 months in prison for having cybersex with teens.
In 2012 Brian Brijbag, at the time 34-year-old youth pastor at First Baptist Church Brookville, took a plea deal to avoid trial after he was accused of unlawful sex with a 17-year-old girl.
The list also includes yet another youth and music pastor, Brian Neiswender. According to the church, Neiswender pleaded no contest to charges of indecent assault and corruption of minors while working for the Heritage Baptist Church in Lakeland in 2003.
In a statement, the SBC executive committee said that it has created a confidential hotline for sexual abuse survivors to submit allegations of abuse within the SBC.
The hotline can be reached at 202-864-5578 or SBChotline@guidepostsolutions.com.