For decades, a sexual predator doctor groomed this community to believe he could do no wrong.
Erika Brosig says she was assaulted by Dr. Johnnie Barto in 1994 when she was 12 and remains haunted by what happened to her.Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — More than 20 years later, it’s the ribbons that stick out in Erika Brosig’s memory of the day when it seemed like the entire town showed up at the high school football game to support Dr. Johnnie Barto.
Brosig said she was 12 when she was assaulted by Barto in 1994 and remains haunted by what happened to her. Goetz said Barto violated her in 1984 at his old practice in Johnstown when she was about 8. As a result, she said, she avoids male doctors. She said the time for exposing the secret that she has been hiding is long overdue.Justin Merriman / for NBC NewsBarto pleaded guilty in December to multiple counts of indecent assault and endangering the welfare of children, theIt took accusations from “family members who were minors” to get Barto to finally own up to his crimes, the AG’s office said.
“I could have been the last victim,” Lee Ann Berkebile, 29, of Johnstown, one of the first patients to file complaints against Barto in the 1990s, said in a brief telephone interview. “We just got blown off, they kept dismissing us,” she said. “I wish we had done more, gone to the police. When I think of all those kids who were hurt after me, that’s what kills me. All those kids.”
In essence, Hawdon said, Barto “was a type of con man who, instead of gaining someone’s confidence to steal their belongings, gained the town’s confidence to exploit the town’s youth.”Barto, who is being held in the Cambria County Prison, has made no public statements since his guilty plea. Neither did his lawyer, David Weaver, when NBC News reached out to him.
Barto was also involved in the district’s music boosters program, coached baseball and softball teams in town, and opened his home to foreign exchange students. Prosecutors working for the state’s Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs charged that Barto fondled a 4-year-old in 1994, a 13-year-old in 1995, and 3-year-old that January — right in front of her mother, the paper reported.
Barto “abused both his minor patients’ trust in him, and their parents’ trust, that he would behave inappropriately with their children for his own gratification,” state medical license examiner Suzanne Rauer wrote. “He diagnosed her with diabetes when she was 8 months old. At 9 months, she was on an insulin pump,” she said. “He advocated for me and for her with specialists. We had a wonderful rapport and there was never any inkling that he was doing anything wrong.”“He personally called me and asked me to speak at that rally,” she said. “You’re damn right I feel betrayed.”Barto vowed to appeal the loss of his license to the Pennsylvania Board of Medicine and then caught a lucky break.
Barto went back to work, this time at the clinic in Richland Township. He told the local paper he was grateful for all the support and relieved his ordeal was over. “It was awful, every time I saw her, it all came back to me,” Dorich said of one relative in particular. Summoned by the Richland Township police, Barto demonstrated to a detective that he had been “holding the child with his hand directly over the vaginal area,” the affidavit states.
In March 2018, Barto was charged with two counts of indecent assault, one count of corruption of minors, and with endangering the welfare of children after a 29-year-old woman came forward and said the doctor molested her at age 14 while she was sleeping on a couch in his home back in 2002.
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