Due at a Hays County courthouse and out on bond, the defendant, on trial for indecency with a child by sexual contact, left a judge and lawyers hanging and went on the lam.
Sound familiar? But this wasn’t Prakashanand Saraswati, the Hindu guru and founder of Austin’s Barsana Dham ashram who disappeared the day he was to be sentenced on his conviction of indecency with a child by sexual contact.
Rather, this was a case of legal deja vu in San Marcos.
John Everett Fitch, 43, was in the middle of his trial when, on Wednesday, June 15, he bolted. Out on $25,000 bond, he hasn’t been seen since. He was subsequently convicted on the charges in absentia, according to Hays County District Attorney Sherri Tibbe.
But with two cases of men charged with sex crimes out on bond during their trials running away, does Hays County have an absconding problem?
Tibbe said no. “This is not a common occurrence for people to run in the middle of trial and it does not happen that often,” the DA wrote in an e-mail. “For it to happen twice in a span of 4 months, is an aberration, in my opinion, and I can not explain except to say that there were two criminal defendants who did not want to face the consequences of their actions.”
Tibbe added that bail is set by a judge. Only in certain instances — the accused is a provable flight risk, for example — can a prosecutor request an increase in the amount of money a defendant must post to gain his freedom pending prosecution. In Fitch’s case, “there was no cause, of which I am aware, upon which the State could have based a bond increase,” the prosecutor said.
Moreover, she noted, the amount of bail does not guarantee a defendant won’t run. “If they have money they can make bail no matter how high it is set,” Tibbe said. “The Swami’s bond was $11 million.”
Earlier this month, a Hays County judge ruled that Hays County was entitled to keep a $1 million cash bond that infomercial millionaire and Prakashanand devotee Peter Spiegel had put up to secure the guru’s freedom pending his trial. The judge also ruled that Prakashanand owed another $10 million promised to the court in 2008 to secure the swami’s passport so that he could travel internationally while his case was pending.
How, or even whether that will ever be collected is uncertain. Prakashanand, now 82, was convicted March 4 by a Hays County jury on 20 counts of indecency with a child by sexual contact. The charges stemmed from the accusations of two women who asserted that the guru molested them when they were young girls growing up on the ashram.
The verdict was rendered on March 4. On March 7, Prakashanand was to appear for his sentencing. But the night before he disappeared from a devotee’s Driftwood house where he’d been staying. He has not been seen since. The jury sentenced him in absentia to 14 years in prison.
According to the U.S. Marshals Service, the guru was believed to have slipped across the Texas-Mexico border soon after he fled San Marcos. Although federal authorities initially believed he had worked his way south, from Nuevo Laredo into the interior of Mexico, Deputy Marshall Hector Gomez said the agency is now concentrating its efforts on Florida.
The reason: Two weeks ago, the American’s Most Wanted television show aired an update on the swami’s disappearance. The program generated “four or five” tips that placed Prakashanand in Florida, Gomez said, adding that two of the tips placing the guru in a specific location were “dead on.”
According to former devotees, Prakashanand has several long-time supporters in Florida.