Editor’s note: The following report includes details of alleged sexual battery of children.
The wife of a former Palmer Home employee accused of sexually abusing children testified Thursday her husband was charged after more than a year of a strained relationship with one of the two alleged victims.
Kara Copes, 42, is married to Seth Copes, 45, who is currently standing trial in Lowndes County Circuit Court for two counts of sexual battery. The couple was employed as house parents at Palmer Home for Children from 2006-13. They were terminated from their positions in 2013 after twin sister under their care alleged Seth Copes abused them in 2006 when the twins were 8 years old.
Throughout the trial, which began Tuesday, three witnesses — including a 21-year-old not related to the twins and who is not named in the indictment — said Seth Copes had touched them inappropriately multiple times while they were living with the couple at Palmer Home and he thought they were asleep. The witness not related to the twins testified she had told Kara Copes about the alleged abuse shortly after it happened in 2008 and that Kara Copes told her she was dreaming. A behavior incident report authored by Kara Copes said that child had dreamed of Seth Copes touching her and that “it hurts.”
Under oath Thursday, Kara Copes said the witness came to her and told her she thought it might not have been a dream, leading Kara Copes to bring all nine girls living in the home at the time — including her own biological daughters — into one room to ask if anyone else was abused. At that point, Kara Copes said, even the witness said no. She said she turned the report in to Palmer Home counselors who talked with all nine of the girls separately. She added other house parents learned of the report in the coming days.
“We had nothing to hide, and I wanted everyone to know about it,” she said.
“I wrote up everything I knew,” she later told prosecutors.
She emphasized she did not discourage anyone from reporting abuse, contradicting other trial witnesses who said they had seen her angry and became too afraid to tell Palmer Home administration.
Kara Copes said no one else raised any allegations against her husband until 2013.
A ‘roller coaster’ relationship
That only happened, Kara Copes said, after a year of a “roller coaster” relationship with one of the twins who she said had problems controlling her anger. She said that twin had lost internet privileges several times and was taken out of sports after she threw a book at one of the counselors — a punishment which, she stressed to prosecutors, was determined by counselors, not by her or her husband.
“There was just a lot of lashing out at us,” Kara Copes said. “…(The twin) kept referring to ‘she didn’t like these rules, she didn’t like these rules.'”
She said the counselors and the twins’ grandparents were all concerned about the behavioral issues.
On the last day of school before summer vacation in 2013, she said she learned the twins had stolen her daughter’s iPod and broken it. Kara Copes told the twins they would have to pay for the iPod.
About a month later, Kara Copes said, when the twins were staying with an aunt, she texted them to let them know she had taken $20 each from their accounts and that their debt was paid.
She said the twins called back offering to give the daughter a different iPod, and she told them she had already ordered a new one.
“(One of them) started screaming and getting very angry,” Kara Copes said, adding she could hear the other twin also yelling in the background.
After the phone conversation, Kara Copes said Seth Copes called them back and told them sports would be “on the line” for the next year if they didn’t “watch their attitude.”
She said they learned of the allegations against Seth Copes within about two days of that phone conversation.
Counseling wasn’t working
Assistant District Attorney Scott Rogillio focused on Kara Copes’ role as disciplinarian, asking her at one point, “Why not just call it obedience school?”
He also asked why the twin kept having to go to counseling if it didn’t appear to be working.
“You don’t see results right away,” Kara Copes said. “… They have to have a relationship with the therapist (to open up to them).”
She also said it was important for the children to go to counselors and other Palmer Home employees, contradicting what one of the victims said about feeling she couldn’t go to administrators without Seth and Kara Copes knowing about it.
“Kids needed to know they had lots of people,” Kara Copes said.
Other witnesses
Before Kara Copes testified, prosecutors showed videos from 2013 of all three girls who accused Seth Copes telling their stories to a child abuse specialist in Tupelo. Prosecutors also played an audio recording from 2013 of the twins telling their grandparents what happened.
Each of the three girls had previously testified in court, and their individual stories about what Seth Copes allegedly did to them matched what they told interviewers in 2013.
The stories they told interviewers at the time also matched each other’s, with one of the twins and the unrelated witness saying they had talked about the abuse before the twin left for her aunt’s home. The witness had wanted to come forward and the twin had not, so they had decided not to tell.
That story contradicted their testimonies earlier this week, when the twin said she only remembered talking to the witness about the abuse in 2006 and with the witness saying she didn’t remember talking to either twin about the abuse at all.
The jury also heard from police officers who were investigators with Columbus Police Department in 2013 and who interviewed the three girls along with Palmer Home CEO Drake Bassett. However, the lead investigator said he never talked to anyone in the Copes family. When pressed by prosecutors, he added neither of the Copes’ ever came to CPD to tell their side of the story.
Kara Copes said she was interviewed by Palmer Home employees and employees of the Department of Human Services after the twins made their allegations.
Defense attorney Patrick Rand of Richland also called three other women who worked at Palmer Home, two as house parents and one as a “relief parent,” who spent one week a month with the Palmer Home children when the Copes family was on vacation. None of them said they had any firsthand knowledge of Seth Copes abusing the children.
The trial will continue Friday. Defense attorney Thomas Pavlinic of Maryland previously told the jury Seth Copes would testify.
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