Vermilion Parish man who exposed clergy abuse beaten to death in Lake Charles

LAKE CHARLES — Some have called Vermilion Parish native Scott Gastal a hero after he testified against former Catholic priest Gibert Gauthe, who admitted to sexually abusing more than two dozen children while serving in the Diocese of Lafayette.
Gastal was only 11 years old when he testified
His testimony back in the 1980s helped set in motion the exposure of widespread sex abuse and cover-ups nationwide.
Gastal, 50, died last week, nine days after being badly beaten in a parking lot on North Lakeshore Drive. Reese Iles Chaumont, 28, of Lake Charles, is facing a second-degree murder charge in connection with his death.
At the time, the diocese had already paid more than $4 million in settlements to nine families of victims, but Gastal’s family refused to settle, the Guardian reports. Their civil case was the only one heard in open court, and the family ultimately won more than $1 million.
In 1986, Scott Gastal testified in open court how Father Gauthe had abused him so badly, he had to be hospitalized.
In 2002, Gastol gave an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes about what he was still going through almost 20 years later.
“I don’t like to be around people. I just try not to feel at all. For the longest time I just tried to black all this out so it wouldn’t hurt me no more,” he said.

Gauthe was the first priest in the U.S. to be criminally indicted for sex abuse, and his trial was among the first to be widely publicized. His trial revealed that officials in the church knew about his crimes for 10 years before his indictment.
Gauthe served 10 years of a 20-year sentence after accepting a plea deal. Now 80, he reportedly lives in the Galveston area.In the following decades, many of the largest dioceses in the country were also investigated for covering up similar sex abuse.Lafayette attorney Cle’ Simon, whose father represented Gastal’s family in the ‘80s, provided the following statement to KPLC, a TV station in Lake Charles:
“Like all other sexual abuse victims, Scott surely lived a tortured, troubled and difficult life, having been robbed of his youthful innocence. My continued involvement in clergy sexual abuse cases has convinced me that there is probably no end in sight to the number of innocent children that were subjected to clergy sexual abuse in the horrible consequences resulting therefrom.”