19
February
“I’VE BEEN DYING FOR 25 YEARS”; HOW A COP STALLED HIS CHILD SEX ABUSE TRIAL FOR DECADES. Retired cop Leonard Forte said he couldn’t be tried for the rape of a 12-year-old because he was dying. That was in 1995. He’s still alive and free.
November 21, 2019
Gus Garcia-Roberts
USA Today
In 1995, Leonard Forte was due in a Vermont courtroom to face charges that he’d repeatedly raped and molested his daughter’s 12-year-old friend.
Instead, he started dying.
Forte, then a 54-year-old former detective with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in New York, told the Vermont court his heart had failed and that he was on a transplant list. He said his doctors had given him a grim diagnosis: Without a new heart, he’d be dead within a year.
A Vermont prosecutor agreed to delay the case until Forte