One of the owners of the Wyndham Sugar Bay Beach Club says he learned only Thursday about the arrest Tuesday of a children's activities supervisor at the St. Thomas resort on charges of raping a 9-year-old girl placed in his care there in April. Meantime, a corporate spokesman for Wyndham would say only that the hotel chain "is cooperating with the investigation" of the case.
"The corporate office only notified me about it yesterday," Sugar Bay co-owner David Moinian said Friday from his office in New York.
Moinian said he is one of "a group of five or six owners" who purchased the hotel about four years ago but are not actively involved in its operations. "We have a management agreement with Wyndham," he said.
At Sugar Bay, queries Friday were directed to food and beverage manager Gary Cahill in the absence of general manager Rick Blyth, who is off-island, according to an executive office aide. Cahill in turn referred all questions concerning the incident to Fred Stern in the Wyndham corporate offices in Dallas.
Stern would say only, "We're not commenting, other than to say that we are cooperating with the investigation."
According to published reports, Sugar Bay Kids Club supervisor Brian Hornby was charged on Wednesday with aggravated rape of the child, whose family stayed at the resort the week of April 9. Police were meantime investigating a report that the 22-year-old Hornby tried to fondle another guest, a 10-year-old girl, at about the same time, and were also seeking to contact an unspecified number of other families of children who had been left in his care at the resort.
The 9-year-old lives in the Washington, D.C., area, according to the reports, and the 10- year-old lives in England.
Radio One news reported that local authorities moved to take Hornby into custody after receiving information from investigators in Fairfax County, Va., outside the nation's capital. Assistant Attorney General Douglas Sprotte was quoted in The V.I. Daily News as saying a medical exmination conducted there indicated that the child had been sexually molested.
According to published reports, Hornby has worked at Sugar Bay for about six months and has been an employee of the Wyndham chain for about three years.
Stern declined to discuss "our procedures or our policies" regarding the screening of applicants for sensitive positions within the hotel chain. Asked whether such an incident had ever occurred at another Wyndham property, he said, "Again, I'm not going to make any comment regarding this case."
A release from the V.I. Justice Department transmitted to other media but not to the Source on Wednesday stated that Hornby was arrested Tuesday by Justice agents in conjunction with the Safe Streets Task Force. It said Justice officials were in the process of "contacting the families of the other children Mr. Hornby supervised." It added, "Families residing in the Virgin Islands need not be concerned."
Conviction of the aggravated rape of a child under the age of 13 carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Territorial Court Judge Ishmael Meyers set bail for Hornby at $50,000 and remanded him to the Bureau of Corrections on Wednesday, the Daily News said.
Telephone calls to the Police Department's Investigations Bureau went unanswered Friday. An officer answering 911 said "they are out on the road." Calls to the Corrections Bureau also went unanswered.
St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association president Richard Doumeng was quoted in the Daily News as saying, "This is really the first of any incident like that I have ever heard of in any hotel program, not just in the Virgin Islands." He also noted that children's activity programs have become an important part of the product that resorts market today in efforts to attract the large family travel sector.
The newspaper also quoted Amy Atkinson of the government's mainland publicity agency, Martin Public Relations, as saying she anticipated little, if any, fallout from the incident. "Back in the states, unfortunately, you hear about these things in day care frequently," she was quoted as saying. "The whole destination isn't going to be taking the fall for one person."
Moinian noted that at the St. Thomas property, "There's 400 people that work there" and the charges are against only one of them. With regard to the local management, he said, "I'm sure they are good people, and I'm quite confident that the truth will come out."
