A Brazilian priest mentioned in the credits of the Oscar-winning film Spotlight about historic sex abuse in the US committed suicide in a prison cell after being arrested again for suspected child sex abuse, authorities in Minas Gerais state, just north of Rio, said today.
Local authorities said that Father Bonifacio Buzzi hanged himself with bed sheets in his prison cell on Sunday, a day after he was re-arrested.
In 1995 he was found guilty of abusing several youngsters in a psychiatric hospital and sentenced to four years of house arrest. In 2004, he was found guilty of molesting an 11-year-old boy but fled before authorities could detain him. He was arrested in 2007 and imprisoned until 2015.
Buzzi, 57, was arrested again in early August in the southern state of Santa Catarina and was taken back to Minas Gerais, where he had been charged with molesting another youth.
The Vatican was taking action against the priest, but the process had not been concluded.
In the film Spotlight - which documents the investigation by the Boston Globe into the covering up of sexual abuse in Boston, Massachusetts, by Catholic priests - the city of Mariana, where Buzzi worked in the local parish, was included as one of the locations where Religious abused youths.
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