*News
Release* Date: May 25, 2011
Middlesex
County Prosecutor’s Office
Former North Brunswick man convicted of sex assaults
A
jury sitting in New Brunswick deliberated less than an hour on May 24, 2011,
before finding Joseph Gordon (DOB 9/19/59) guilty of 12 counts of aggravated
sexual assault, sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual contact, criminal
sexual contact and endangering the welfare of each child.
He
will be sentenced to up to 40 years in a New Jersey state prison when is
scheduled to appear on September 12, 2011, before Superior Court Judge Joseph
Paone at the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick.
During
the trial that began on May 19, 2011, Middlesex County Deputy First Assistant
Prosecutor Christie L. Bevacqua argued that Gordon repeatedly sexually
assaulted the girls in his home in Somerset, and later, in North Brunswick
after moving to the township.
Bevacqua
told the jury that one girl was repeatedly assaulted from 1996 until June 2000,
when she was 12 to 16 years old. The
other girl was repeatedly assaulted from June 1999 to June 2000 while she was 12
and 13, Bevacqua said.
Police
began an investigation after the girls told their mother of the sexual
assaults.
Gordon
fled and remained a fugitive until police found him and arrested him on
November 22, 2006, in East Orange.
During
the investigation into the assaults, police learned from a minister that Gordon
admitted the crimes to him, but the case was tried without that testimony,
after the state Supreme Court ruled it was a privileged conversation and could
not be presented to a jury.
Gordon
remains in custody at the