A Merrimack County jury awarded $16 million to a woman who was sexually abused over 100 times while placed at a Deerfield group home as a child.
However, the jury placed the bulk of the responsibility for paying the damages on her dead abuser, rather than on the Department of Health and Human Services, which sent her to the group home despite a prior report that the owner had abused another girl almost a decade earlier.
The jury found that 25% of the fault lay with the agency, which corresponds to a damages payment of $4 million. It found that the abuser, Peter Tsetsilas, was 60% responsible; that his wife and the group home’s co-owner, Beverly, who has also died, was 10% responsible; and that their institution, Saddleback Mountain Retreat, was 5% responsible.
A lawyer for the plaintiff, Kristy Gesse, said that her legal team would appeal the apportionment of the verdict to the state’s Supreme Court.
“Once DHHS had legal custody of Kristy, as the law says that they did, they had a duty to protect her from people like Peter Tsetsilas or Beverly Tsetsilas,” said attorney David Vicinanzo.
That duty, Vicinanzo argued, couldn’t be delegated to the entities, like Saddleback, that the state contracted to care for children.
If Gesse’s appeal were denied, she would likely only receive the $4 million in damages from the state, according to Vicinanzo.
“After years of suffering in silence, this trial brought out the truth about what happened to me as a young girl,” Gesse said in a statement. “The state knew they were placing me in the care of a predator, and they chose to look the other way.”
Gesse said the state abdicated its responsibility to protect her.
“Nothing can give me back what was lost, but knowing they are being held accountable feels like a heavy weight lifted,” she said.
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, which defended against the lawsuit, said the agency respected the jury’s verdict.
“It is significant that the jury recognized that the individual who committed the criminal acts bears most of the liability for the plaintiff’s damages,” wrote Michael Garrity.
“We extend our sympathies to the plaintiff and acknowledge the difficulties she endured in bringing this case,” he added. “Our commitment to protecting vulnerable children and serving the people of New Hampshire remains unwavering.”
The civil case was the second to go to trial out of more than 1,600 filed since 2020 alleging abuse in state-run and contracted facilities. Like the first one, brought by plaintiff David Meehan, it will involve a post-verdict dispute over damages.
In the first case, a Rockingham County jury awarded Meehan $38 million in 2024 for abuse sustained at the state’s Youth Development Center. However, because the jurors wrote on the verdict form that Meehan had suffered just one “incident,” the verdict was reduced to the statutory cap of $475,000.
Meehan’s attorneys, who also represent Gesse, appealed to the Supreme Court in that case, as well. The court has yet to rule in the matter.
In Gesse’s case, the lawyers and Judge John Kissinger took pains to avoid a repeat of the confusion surrounding what qualifies as an “incident,” defining it as each “separate unit of experience.”
The jury of eight women and four men deliberated for roughly six hours over two days, reaching a verdict at around 12 p.m. on Tuesday.
They found that Gesse had experienced 106 incidents of abuse.
Gesse was 16 years old when she was placed at the Deerfield group home in the fall of 1992. She testified during the two-week trial that Peter Tsetsilas, who was then 49, engaged in grooming behavior that escalated to rape.
The abuse continued for several months and involved Tsetsilas kidnapping Gesse and checking her into a Concord motel under another child’s name. In February 1993, Concord police responded to the motel to conduct a welfare check, where they discovered Gesse.
Gesse said she realized the state was liable for the abuse she experienced after reading in 2022 about other cases that had been filed against the state involving its youth detention facilities.
Several months before the start of her trial, Gesse’s lawyers discovered that another girl had also been abused by Tsetsilas. The girl, identified in court as L.O., reported the abuse to State Police and a child welfare employee in the mid-1980s, but the state licensed Tsetsilas as an approved group home provider anyway.
“They knew that Tsetsilas was a predator, and they put Kristy into his custody – essentially put her in the lion’s den – and he, being a predator, did what predators do and he abused her, raped her, more than 100 times,” Vicinanzo said following the verdict.
Vicinanzo said that the jury should not have been given the authority to apportion fault to the Tsetsilases and their group home. The issue was the subject of litigation prior to the trial, he said.
The $16 million verdict is one of the largest in a personal injury case in New Hampshire. In addition to the $38 million verdict in Meehan’s case, the state settled a pair of other abuse cases for $10 million and $4.5 million last year.
Unlike in those cases, Gesse did not accuse state employees of abusing her, which made proving the state’s liability more complicated.
Because her abuse did not occur in a state-run facility, she was also one of approximately 300 individuals deemed ineligible for the settlement fund that the state established as an alternative to civil litigation.
The fund caps settlements at $2.5 million and has been the subject of controversy since its inception.
“I think the settlement fund, more and more, looks like a good deal for the state,” Vicinanzo said.
