When a man reaches the age of 61 and has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with young girls, the last thing you want to hear are excuses. Even worse than excuses are when the man is a person who has earned the trust of his community and the young people in his care.
Jacoby Kindred of St. Paul, Minnesota, was considered to be a grandfather figure to the young people around him. But he was something much more frightening, since, according to police, he was responsible for touching the children in ways that they shouldn’t be touched by anyone.
Police say that they were alerted when one of the girls wrote a note explaining what the pastor was doing and one of her relatives found it. The victims, two of them in their teens, say that the pastor would fondle them and stimulate them orally and penetrate them. They said that he told them that “the devil was inside them” and that sex would remove the demons.
The pastor, who is from One Accord Ministries, was allegedly touching the girls for nine years. He says that his son was dating the mother of the girls, and that they would stay at his house. However, he says that the girls made it all up because the woman’s new boyfriend doesn’t like him.
“These are not really kids,” Jacoby Kindred said according to reporter Emily Gurnon of Pioneer Press. “They have the mind of the adult.”
The pastor says that he is innocent and that there is no DNA evidence that he did anything to the girls. He says that it’s a witch hunt and that even an accusation like this can ruin a man’s reputation.
“I never did anything like that. Anyone can make up anything when you sit there long enough and you rehearse it,” Kindred said according to Pioneer Press. “All a woman has to do (in Minnesota) is make an accusation, true or false, and the man’s going to be in trouble.”
