By JOHN BURNETT
By JOHN BURNETT
Tribune-Herald staff writer
A 70-year-old Ocean View man who molested two underage girls who attended a church where he had been a deacon was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison.
Kona Circuit Judge Ronald Ibarra handed down the sentence to Nicholas King Krivanek. In a plea deal with prosecutors, Krivanek pleaded guilty on Oct. 10 to 13 counts of third-degree sexual assault. In return for his plea, the state dropped two counts of continuous sexual assault of a minor under the age of 14, a Class A felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Krivanek had been a deacon and a “youth mentor” — the latter an unofficial title — at Ocean View Evangelical Community Church. Krivanek was “removed” from those positions at the church in the remote Ka‘u community after “he confessed” to the church’s elders in 2011, Larry Fisher, who was secretary of the elders at that time, told the Tribune-Herald in June.
Fisher said Krivanek drove children to church activities that their parents couldn’t or didn’t want to provide transportation to. The white-haired and bearded Krivanek also played Santa Claus for church functions and for functions at the Ocean View Community Center.
Krivanek came to Hawaii from Moscow, Idaho. The Tribune-Herald could find no record of convictions on sex offenses there, a but a Moscow woman told the Tribune-Herald on Thursday that Krivanek had molested her developmentally disabled daughter, who is now an adult. She said the alleged abuse occurred when the girl was between the ages of nine and 16.
“He met her at the swimming pool when she was 9,” the woman said. “She’s really nice to people and he was around kids. He told me he’d like to help my kids out because he knew my ex-husband had a criminal record. So I was dealing with a child getting into trouble with the court system, four other kids, and of course, (the girl). With her being disabled, it was a little hard for me, so he said, ‘Oh, I just want to be there for you and I’ll take her to church and other places.’
“She didn’t tell me until five to 10 years later when he was already in Hawaii, out of range.”
The young woman, now 22, also spoke to the Tribune-Herald.
“I didn’t know at first what he was doing to me,” she said. “I thought it was just him being nice to me because I never had a father. My father left when I was little. I thought it was just him being nice to me, saying, ‘Oh, I’ll give you this.’ But when I got a little older, about 10 or 11, I started to figure it out. And it scared me so much I couldn’t tell a cop or my mother.”
The girl said Krivanek molested her in a public restroom. She said they were questioned by police when they were seen leaving the bathroom together, but she didn’t tell police what Krivanek did.
“Nick told me I would be a bad person and people would think I was a liar,” she said.
“My mom didn’t even know and she thought it was her fault that I just told her in July that Nick molested me and put his (penis) inside me and washed the sperm out when the cops came,” she said.
She said she hopes Krivanek “dies in jail.”
“I hope he don’t ever get out because I hate him,” she said. “He used his religion against my whole family because we thought he was a nice person. And I could not tell my mother because he threatened me that if I told, my mom would not love me. He said my dad left because of me. And I already felt like my dad left because of me, so he used that against me.”
The young woman’s mother said her daughter suffers stress-related seizures and the victim said she is still traumatized by the memory of Krivanek.
“I can’t look at Santa Claus without bawling my eyes out,” she said.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.