Former N.H. youth detention center leader guilty of holding down teen while he was raped

A former juvenile detention center leader in New Hampshire was convicted Tuesday of holding down a teen while colleagues raped him in 1998.

A jury found Bradley Asbury, now 70, guilty on two counts of being an accomplice to aggravated sexual assault, each count carrying up to 20 years of prison time. They arrived at the verdict after three days of deliberation, on the heels of a four-day trial.

The case was just one stemming from a years-long investigation into abuse at the state-run Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, N.H., then known as the Youth Development Center.

The plaintiff, 41-year-old Michael Gilpatrick, alleged that Asbury and another colleague restrained him on a staircase when he was 14. A third staffer raped him while a fourth forced him to perform a sex act, Gilpatrick said.

Gilpatrick cried and hugged his family members when the verdict was read.

“God is good and the truth prevailed,” he told The Associated Press. “I was believed.”

This was the second criminal trial related to longtime abuse at the facility and another affiliated center in Concord. An earlier criminal case, this one accusing former Concord center staffer Victor Malavet of raping a teenage girl in 2001, ended in a mistrial with a deadlocked jury in September.

One civil case has gone to trial. In May, a jury awarded former resident David Meehan $38 million, though the state is trying to cap that at $475,000.

Currently there are nearly 1,300 cases brought against the state of New Hampshire by former juvenile detention center residents who claim they suffered years of abuse, according to NPR.

Asbury is one of 11 men arrested to date who worked in either the Manchester or Concord facilities. He had been fired for alleged abuse long before the incident with Gilpatrick, then rehired with back pay and record of that abuse expunged.

He was part of a group of six center employees, known as the “hit squad” for their abusive tactics, who were initially arrested in 2021 for alleged sex crimes against the children.

In all, 150 former staffers stand accused of physically or sexually harming 230 children aged 7 to 18 in a pattern of abuse spanning decades, from 1963 and 2018.

With News Wire Services