St. Louis JCC Worker Charged in Child Rape
A 20-year-old employee at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center has been arrested and charged with raping a child.
William “Billy” Hogenmiller was charged Tuesday with rape in the first degree, the St. Louis Jewish Light reported the following day, after being arrested Feb. 26 by St. Louis County police.
Hogenmiller previously worked at the JCC’s day camp and has been suspended from a position in its afterschool program.
The alleged crime did not occur at the JCC or Hogenmiller’s other workplace, where he provided respite care for children and adults with disabilities.
“I was told by the detective that he does not believe anything happened at those workplaces,” said Shawn McGuire, the police media relations officer, according to the Jewish Light.
JCC leaders told the Jewish Light that the institution conducts background checks as part of the hiring process and checks every employee against the national sex offender registry.
In August, a male day camp employee at the JCC of Metropolitan Detroit was arrested and charged with possessing and distributing child pornography. Matthew Kuppe, 21, was fired following his arrest and is negotiating a plea deal, according to media reports.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO