The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Angela Klickner, a volunteer at Landmark Baptist Church in Grand Junction, Colorado, stands accused of sexually assaulting several minors. Landmark is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) congregation.
A church volunteer on the Western Slope was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting at least two juveniles.
The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office said 31-year-old Angela Klickner is facing 13 potential felony charges.
Klickner was arrested on suspicion of the following:
10 counts of sexual assault on a child, position of trust – pattern of abuse
2 counts of obscenity
1 count of criminal extortion
Klickner, who lives in Clifton, was a volunteer at Landmark Baptist Church in Grand Junction from 2022 to 2023, the sheriff’s office said.
Church officials were told about Klickner’s inappropriate contact with the victims and in turn notified the sheriff’s office.
Klickner turned herself in after sheriff’s investigators obtained an arrest warrant.
She’s being held in the Mesa County jail under a $100,000 cash-only bond. Her next court date is scheduled for May 22.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Equal opportunity pedophilia. It’s not just for dirty old men anymore. Well, she deserves her due process so it remains for the evidence to be weighed. Children are problematic witnesses being especially vulnerable to being led by authority figures like parents, cops, etc. Anyone harboring the delusion that children don’t lie needs to review the McMartin Daycare case. Many, perhaps most, children will say whatever to get an adult to stop pressuring them.
Yes Dutch, exactly right about children and credibility. It’s a point obviously disputed by Catholics, but I’ve read from at least two sources that when the Pope in the eleventh century decided to make celibacy a requirement for the Priesthood, that there was a realisation that natural urges had to be…requited, let’s say! It is suggested that there was implicit, but pretty universal, acceptance that children would serve for this purpose. They were obviously in awe of the authority of the priests, so probably wouldn’t realise that sexual abuse was wrong, and in any event who would believe a child over that of a priest? Regardless as to the historical truth of this narrative, there’s no doubt that it’s been a fact of the Church throughout its history, and of course continues to this day.