Several from South Florida are on newly released Southern Baptist sex offender list
A list of hundreds of alleged sexual abuse offenders released Thursday by Southern Baptist Convention leadership includes dozens from Florida.
Of the more than 600 people named in the database compiled by the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee, at least 56 served as clergy or in other church leadership roles in the state. At least five worked at churches in the South Florida region.
Two of those worked in Miami. Jerome Dieuseul, a former pastor at South Florida Baptist Church, was arrested in November 2010 and convicted for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl. He remains in prison at Everglades Correctional Institution in Miami with his release set for August 2023, according to state records.
READ MORE: More than 50 Florida pastors on Southern Baptist Church’s list of alleged sexual abusers
The database also names Keith Geren, a former youth minister at Wayside Baptist Church in Miami who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1990 for molesting nearly a dozen teenage boys. A judge later levied a $4.2 million civil judgment against the Kendall church for negligence and awarded $6.7 million to the victim who brought the case. Geren has since been released from prison and is a registered sex offender, records show.
Church leadership published the list four days after releasing a 288-page third-party investigation that found survivors of sexual abuse who reported offenders to the executive committee were “met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.”
Some names redacted from the list
Many of the entries name people who have been convicted of sexual abuse and are registered sex offenders, featuring links to news articles about their cases. Other names and details were redacted in cases in which the executive committee said there has been “no disposition” or admission of guilt.
The executive committee provided the list to Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the committee to investigate the church’s handling of sexual abuse complaints. The document notes that the entries were “largely pulled from news articles compiled from 2007 until 2022.”
“It is incomplete. It has not been proofed. It has not been adequately researched,” the document says, noting that it was created “as a research tool to discover the scope of sexual abuse of children within the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The list of alleged offenders had been kept secret for more than a decade.
“This list is being made public for the first time as an initial, but important, step toward addressing the scourge of sexual abuse and implementing reform in the convention,” Executive Committee Chairman Rolland Slade and Interim President Willie McLaurin said in a statement.
Others on the list with South Florida ties include James Harris, a former Belle Glade pastor sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2012 for sexual abuse of a teenage boy; Lyndon Howell, former associate pastor of Community Missionary Baptist Church in Delray Beach, who was convicted in 2001 of sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl; and Russell Dion Lewis, former worship leader and assistant youth pastor at Church by the Glades in Coral Springs, who was sentenced to 28 years in 2011 for sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl.
