Court records, news reports point to more Baptist ministers linked to sexual abuse in NC
As part of a reckoning with sexual abuse within congregations, The Southern Baptist Convention recently released a list of hundreds of cases where church staff or volunteers had been accused of rape, child sex abuse and related crimes.
But the list omits several men accused of abusing congregants, including at least four who had or have ties to North Carolina churches, The Charlotte Observer found by reviewing court records and media reports.
The national Baptist organization emphasized from the beginning that its collection of names – which included more than 30 people who at some point had ties to North Carolina Baptist congregations – was not exhaustive and derived mostly from news reports.
The additional people with North Carolina ties include an Asheville youth leader arrested at a children’s camp, a former Mooresville church volunteer serving 75 years behind bars for molesting boys elsewhere, and a Charlotte-area pastor who was featured in a congregation podcast last year.
Charlotte ties
In a 2011 civil lawsuit, a 23-year-old Charlotte man said he joined Kings Way Baptist Church with his family at age 11. The boy promptly enrolled in several youth programs, which youth pastor Robert Bradley Price supervised, according to the lawsuit. Price couldn’t be reached for comment through the Charlotte-area church or listed phone numbers.
Price, then in his early 30s, encouraged the plaintiff, not named in the suit, to call him “Bobby” and took him to restaurants and the gym, according to the complaint. When the boy reached seventh grade, he wrote in the lawsuit, Price began holding his hand and giving him massages.
Eventually, the plaintiff said Price began molesting him and warned the boy that nobody would believe him if he came forward. At one point Price took him on a church mission trip to Haiti, and shared a room with him and molested him there, according to the complaint, which the church settled in 2013.
After turning 16, the plaintiff left the church. But Price – still working as youth minister at Kings Way then – reached back out to him in late 2010, he wrote in the complaint, prompting him to go to police and file the civil lawsuit, he wrote in the complaint.
Soon after, Price left for a mission trip to Nicaragua, with financial aid from the church. He didn’t return until 2013, when authorities promptly arrested him on five child sex abuse charges, some of them involving the plaintiff.
Along with the church itself, the lawsuit named Price and his father D. Bradley Price as defendants. Church leaders – including the elder Price, who founded the congregation – had ignored basic prevention measures like keeping adults from being alone with children, the plaintiff argued. All parties settled the lawsuit in 2013, according to court records.
Robert Price accepted a plea deal without admitting guilt, and several relatives and friends attended the hearing to support him, The Observer reported. Now 55, Price finished his 20-month prison sentence in 2015 and remains on the sex offender registry, according to state records.
Kings Way no longer exists, but much of its leadership went on to Camino Church in north Charlotte, which Price’s father founded. Robert’s brother, Rusty Price, now serves as head pastor, according to the church’s website.
That website doesn’t name Robert Price as a staff member, but in November he appeared in a church podcast listed as “executive pastor.” His brother in 2018 defended his decision to let Robert continue preaching to the congregation, telling WSOC that Robert Price wasn’t allowed to be with children and that ushers accompany known sex offenders to church bathrooms.
“High accountability, never alone,” Rusty Price told the television station. “We want to provide certain areas where they can serve when it’s appropriate.”
In another Charlotte-area case, Jacop Hazlett attended and volunteered at The Cove Church in Mooresville and Elevation Church in Lake Normanthe churches confirmed. He had no prior criminal record in the Carolinas at the time, prosecutors noted.
After moving to South Carolina, he was sentenced in 2019 to 75 years in prison for molesting several preschool-age boys at NewSpring Church in North Charleston.
But there was also some public awareness of allegations while he was in North Carolina. Davidson police said that they were investigating Hazlett for allegedly sexually assaulting a 7-year-old in 2017, The Observer reported.
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In another case, authorities arrested Trent Brandon Holbert at a children’s camp near Asheville in 2021.
Holbert had reported a couple from his congregation at The Ridge Church to the state Division of Social Services and accused them of neglecting their teenage daughter, according to warrants obtained by the Asheville Citizen Times. The family had refused his request to transfer custody of their daughter to him in the case of their deaths, the warrants claimed.
The girl’s parents contacted the Buncombe County sheriff’s department in May 2021, accusing their former pastor of “engaging in a secret and sexual relationship” with their underage daughter, the Citizen Times reported.
Another out-of-state abuser also slipped past the list. Donald Dean Chambers, a Tennessee resident, was volunteering at Beacon Baptist Church in Raleigh when witnesses called 911 to accuse him of groping a 12-year-old girl during soccer practice at the church, WRAL reported in 2018. Authorities arrested him on a sexual battery charge.
The convention has set up a tip line to collect abuse allegations involving Baptists. Leadership can be reached at 202-864-5578 or SBChotline@guidepostsolutions.com.
This story was originally published June 16, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Court records, news reports point to more Baptist ministers linked to sexual abuse in NC."
