Philly man sentenced for assaulting girl as member of local Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation

A Philadelphia man has been sentenced to two to four years in prison after having been convicted of using his status as a member of a local Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation to sexually assault a 4-year-old girl nearly two decades ago.

A Philadelphia jury convicted David Balosa, 63, of two felony counts of aggravated indecent assault and related misdemeanors in September in connection with the 1998 incident. In addition to his prison sentence, Balosa received six years of probation, and will be included on the sex offender registry for the remainder of his life, the state Attorney General’s Office said.

Balosa moved to Philadelphia from Angola in the mid-1990s, and began living with a Witness congregation family in the city’s Olney neighborhood, court documents indicate. He remained in the family’s home for about a month, and lived in the house’s basement.

During his time there, Balosa sexually abused the family’s 4-year-old daughter, and instructed the girl not to tell anyone about the incident. The girl, who is not identified in court records, did not tell her parents of the abuse for about a decade.

When she was 15, the girl informed her parents Balosa had assaulted her, and they later confronted him. Balosa denied the girl’s allegations, but later admitted the abuse, according to court records.

An attorney representing Balosa declined to comment.

Charges were brought against Balosa in July 2023 as part of a grand jury investigation into the Witnesses’ handling of sexual-abuse cases. Four other men connected with the group were charged with raping and exploiting children at that time. Since October 2022, the Attorney General’s Office has brought charges against more than a dozen members of Witness congregations across Pennsylvania as a result of grand jury investigations.

Those investigations began following a 2018 Inquirer report that found that Witness leaders had for decades worked to prevent information about child sexual assaults from becoming public. The U.S. branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses previously told The Inquirer that any sexual abuse “sickens” the organization, adding that child sexual abuse is a particularly “twisted act of evil.”

“For many years, this survivor lived without a sense of justice or closure for crimes that they endured as a child — and without their bravery, this conviction would not have been possible,” Attorney General Dave Sunday said in a statement about Balosa’s case. “I also commend the Grand Jurors and trial jurors who gave their time and attention to determining the facts in this very important matter.”