Former day-care worker Andrew Vaughan confessed to molesting a 6-year-old girl during his first interview with authorities, a session that lasted less than 15 minutes, a Palatine police officer testified Friday.
Detective Keith Kirkpatrick said Vaughan arrived with his father about 4 p.m. May 16, 1997, at the Palatine police station and was taken alone to a small interrogation room and questioned by Kirkpatrick and another officer.
Kirkpatrick said Vaughan was read his Miranda rights and that Vaughan indicated he did not want his father present before making the alleged admission. The officers then left the room, Kirkpatrick said.
When the two officers returned about five minutes later, Kirkpatrick said, Vaughan gave police the names of several children they should question.
The testimony came on the second day of Vaughan’s trial on charges that he molested two 7-year-old boys and the girl between September 1996 and May 1997, when he worked as a counselor at an after-school day-care program at Virginia Lake School in Palatine.
Under cross-examination by Vaughan’s attorney, Michael T. Norris, Kirkpatrick admitted that Vaughan initially denied the allegations but that Kirkpatrick had failed to include that in his police reports.
Kirkpatrick also repeatedly denied that Vaughan had told him that he was sick with the flu or that he had asked to see his father during questioning.
Vaughan, 19, is accused of molesting the girl on May 15, 1997, in a storage room where toys were kept. The boys were allegedly molested in bathroom stalls on several occasions.
Both boys testified Friday. One, who is now 9, said he was lying when he first denied to a social worker that Vaughan had molested him. He later told Kirkpatrick that he had been molested, according to other testimony.
When he was asked why he had not reported the abuse earlier, the boy said, “I don’t really know. I think I was embarrassed, and I thought he (Vaughan) might do something to me.”
