Lawyers for a woman who was raped approximately one hundred times during her placement at a Deerfield group home in the 1990s have asked a Merrimack County jury to award her more than $100 million in damages.
During a two-week trial, the woman, Kristy Gesse, testified that she was groomed and then repeatedly raped by Peter Tsetsilas, the co-owner of the group home. The abuse began in the fall of 1992, when Gesse was 16, and continued until February 1993, when Concord police conducted a welfare check at a motel in the city where Tsetsilas had held Gesse for 24 days.
“$1 million per incident of rape reflects the magnitude of the harm that Kristy suffered,” her attorney, Nathan Warecki, said during the trial’s closing arguments on Monday. “It reflects the terror of the memories, the lifelong symptoms Kristy will endure, and the life that Kristy lost.”
The jury of eight women and four men began deliberating at 12:20 p.m. on Monday. Their deliberations will continue at 9 a.m. on Tuesday.
The case is the second to go to trial involving abuse at state-run or contracted youth facilities. With hundreds of lawsuits and other claims in the sweeping abuse scandal still unresolved, the verdict could have widespread ramifications for the ongoing adjudication processes in other cases.
Gesse sued the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for running the state’s child welfare system and its youth detention facilities.
Almost a decade before Gesse was placed at Saddleback Mountain Retreat, on Deerfield’s Saddleback Mountain Road, another child reported to state police and a child welfare employee that she, too, had been abused by Tsetsilas, according to police records and the individual’s own testimony during the trial.
The state did not pursue charges against Tsetsilas at the time and licensed his facility as a group home for girls a few years later.
“DHHS knowingly fed more prey to the predator, and they did not protect Kristy,” said Warecki, referring to the acronym for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Lawyers for the department have argued that the state shouldn’t be held liable for the actions of Tsetsilas, who is now dead.
The agency acted reasonably based on the information it had at the time, said Sam Garland, an assistant attorney general for the state.
“Reasonable is not perfection,” he said. “It’s not best practices. It’s not goals or aspirations.”
Garland argued that the blame rested not with the state, but rather with Tsetsilas, his wife, and their facility.
The jury must also decide whether Gesse’s claims were filed within the statute of limitations. Based on the law at the time of the abuse, Gesse had up to three years from the time she discovered the state may be liable to bring her claims.
She testified that she became aware of the state’s potential liability in 2022, when she read media reports about other lawsuits filed by individuals held in the state’s youth detention facilities. She filed her lawsuit months later.
Unlike many of the plaintiffs in the cases she read about, Gesse is ineligible to receive compensation through the state-established settlement fund because her abuse did not occur at a state-run youth detention facility.
The Concord Monitor does not identify victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to come forward publicly, as Gesse has done.
