SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – A former Roman Catholic priest has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for taking a teenage boy on a cruise ship vacation with the intent to engage in illegal sexual conduct.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office on the U.S. Caribbean island says expelled priest Israel Berrios was sentenced Thursday. He pleaded guilty in August 2014.
Prosecutors accused Berrios of giving the 15-year-old boy money, a computer and a camera and taking him on a four-day cruise to the Bahamas with his mother’s permission in July 2008. The victim, now a young adult, was apparently an altar boy at the time.
Berrios previously served as director of a Catholic school in the mountain town of Aibonito and as a priest in the diocese of Caguas, south of the U.S. island’s capital.
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