Earl Gage was a helpful witness for the state in its prosecution of Victor Malavet — the first person brought to trial on criminal charges in the massive child abuse scandal within New Hampshire’s youth detention system.
Malavet is accused of repeatedly raping a 16-year-old girl in 2001 while he worked as a counselor at the Youth Detention Services Unit (YDSU) in Concord, a now defunct facility for children in state custody.
Gage was a police officer who investigated Malavet in 2002, and who also worked overtime shifts as a counselor at another state-run youth detention center in Manchester.
On the witness stand, Gage implied Malavet got away with a crime.
Asked by a prosecutor if he had recommended criminal charges against Malavet back in 2002, Gage testified, “Unfortunately, at that point I could not,” before being cut off by a defense attorney’s objection.
The Malavet trial ended in a hung jury the following the week, putting more scrutiny on the attorney general’s criminal investigation into the historic flood of child abuse allegations, which has so far yielded no convictions five years after it began.
But what escaped scrutiny — or even mention — during Malavet’s trial was the fact that Gage is himself accused of repeatedly raping a child in his role at the former Youth Development Center (YDC) in Manchester.
The revelation, first reported here, highlights the sprawling nature of the YDC abuse scandal, where hundreds of former state employees have been implicated by nearly 1,300 alleged victims, and where parallel civil and criminal efforts at accountability have generated millions of pages of discovery. The allegations range from severe physical and sexual abuse to forcing children to endure long periods of isolation and preventing them from attending school.