A North Carolina man who attended The Pingry School tells of an incident when the teacher now accused of molesting students had a close call with police.
A Gastonia, North Carolina man has become the first to publicly identify himself as one of the alleged victims of the Pingry School teacher accused of molesting boys decades ago, according to a published report.
Raymond Dackerman gave an interview to The Charlotte Observer before he said he planned to tell his son about the abuse he suffered as a 12-year-old student of Thad "Ted" Alton, a teacher who the school now says molested at least 27 students in the Seventies.
He recalled he participated in the first camping trip Alton arranged as a Scout leader. When he returned from the outing, he told The Observer, he retreated to his bedroom and burst into sobs.
"All I wanted to do was go camping," he said. The effect of the abuse was profound: "The clock stopped for all of us," he said.
He also recounted a missed opportunity for law enforcement to have discovered Alton's crimes decades earlier than they did. Dackerman said in the interview that he recalled camping in a tent in Alton's back yard.
At one point the Millburn police came by and asked if everything was all right. Alton said it was, and they left. Dackerman said he recalls having a brief spring of hope that Alton would be found out.
During the six years Alton taught at the Short Hills Country Day School, later acquired by Pingry, he lived first in Millburn, then in Chatham. The incident happened at the Millburn house, which was owned by Pingry and was adjacent to the school's baseball field, Dackerman said.
Eventually authorities learned of a episode in which he played strip poker with his Boy Scout troop, and he was charged in 1979 in Essex County with six counts of private lewdness and impairing the morals of a minor.
But he avoided any prison time and was able to relocate to upstate New York, where he got into trouble a decade later for sodomizing a young teen in a kayaking youth group he founded. He now works in New York and is on the state's sex offender registry.
A group of 18 men, calling themselves the Pingry Survivors, had engaged an Oregon law firm the specializes in suing institutions such as schools and churches for long-time patterns of abuse.
Pingry earlier this week released a long-awaited outside investigation that concluded Alton had molested at least 27 students, and that two other teachers had molested students or acted in highly inappropriate ways.
Kathleen O'Brien may be reached at kobrien@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @OBrienLedger. Find NJ.com on Facebook.