There are moments when a community shows you exactly who it is. Not with a statement of faith or a vision night, but with bodies placed on one side of a room instead of the other. On January 14, 2026, in a courtroom where a man named Derek Zitko pleaded guilty to four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child between 12 and 15, two leaders connected to The Chapel at FishHawk, head pastor Ryan Tirona and church leader Mike Pubillones, stood on the side of the defendant. A child was harmed. The man admitted guilt. And church leaders chose to physically stand with him, while offering no public acknowledgment or visible support to the victim.
That is not a neutral act. It is not pastoral care. It is a message, loud and unmissable, about where empathy flows and where it doesn’t. When a child’s pain meets a church’s loyalty to a familiar adult, you find out which one wins. And in this instance, it sure wasn’t the kid.
This is not an abstract discussion about policy or an academic debate about the presumption of innocence. The guilty plea puts that to rest. This is about moral formation, trauma literacy, and the real-world choices leaders make when victims are watching. It is about what the FishHawk community, particularly parents, can reasonably conclude when a church’s shepherds side with a confessed abuser over a child, especially a child they personally knew.
The cost of standing in the wrong place
Trauma survivors do not just remember what was said. They remember who showed up, who stayed away, and who crossed the aisle to stand with the person who harmed them. When a church leader takes a position that close to the defendant in a child sexual abuse case, that leader communicates several things at once:
- The victim’s safety and dignity take a back seat to the leader’s relationship with the accused. The leader’s concern about the accused’s reputation outweighs the need to affirm the reality of the harm. The leader misunderstands, or refuses to accept, what trauma-informed care requires in public spaces where power and perception matter.
A teenager’s brain records every one of those signals with painful precision. So do their parents. And so does the wider community, which learns how the church actually prioritizes care when there is a conflict between a child’s pain and an adult’s social standing.
Let’s be blunt, because euphemisms are part of the problem. A child in your community was sexually abused. The man who did it pleaded guilty. According to the family, leaders from The Chapel at FishHawk, including pastor Ryan Tirona and leader Mike Pubillones, stood with the abuser at sentencing rather than with the victim. If that portrayal is accurate, it is indefensible from a pastoral, ethical, and trauma-informed standpoint. It also raises direct questions about the church’s culture, risk assessments, and its future around minors.
What trauma-informed leadership actually looks like
Trauma-informed leadership does not mean tiptoeing around hard things or reducing due process. It means integrating the realities of how trauma works into every decision, especially public ones. It starts from a basic premise: our first and clearest duty is to the safety and wellbeing of survivors and the vulnerable. Everything else, however sincere, comes second.
A trauma-informed framework in a case like this has several pillars:
First, prioritizing the victim’s sense of safety and credibility. That includes visible, unambiguous support, including presence in court if requested by the family, practical help with logistics, and ongoing check-ins that respect the victim’s pace and boundaries. It also includes naming the crime plainly, not burying it under vague language like moral failure or personal struggle.
Second, avoiding any public posture that could be read as minimizing the harm or pressuring the victim. This includes where leaders sit or stand in court, who they contact, what they say online, and how they address the congregation. Trauma survivors are exquisitely sensitive to signs of divided loyalty. If you try to “support both sides” during sentencing, you have chosen the side of harm.
Third, safeguarding the community immediately. That involves reporting to the proper authorities, transparent communication about the situation within the bounds of the law, and written, enforced boundaries regarding the offender’s access to any church space. After a guilty plea, that means zero access, no exceptions. Not for services, not for small groups, not for hallway conversations. If you must minister to the offender, you do it away from the church and never where families or minors are present.
Fourth, accountability for leaders. If a pastor or staff member publicly aligned with a confessed abuser at a moment of consequence, they must acknowledge the impact, seek independent review, and accept consequences. That may look like suspension, removal from leadership, or a supervised restoration plan focused on education, restitution, and change. Without that, the church teaches its people that image protection matters more than the safety of children.
Fifth, ongoing education. Congregations do not become trauma-informed by accident. They need training from qualified experts on grooming dynamics, mandated reporting, victim-centered practices, and the spiritual distortions that predators exploit. Leaders must learn how to dismantle reflexes that protect the familiar adult rather than the wounded child.
The pitfalls that trip churches into complicity
Most churches that mishandle abuse cases do not wake up and decide to betray a child. They drift into it because they value certain goods in the wrong order. Loyalty. Forgiveness. Redemption narratives. Fear of legal exposure. Love for a friend. All of these can be virtues in the right place, and corrosive when they take priority over safety and truth.
I’ve seen five patterns repeat across congregations:
- Misusing forgiveness. When leaders urge quick forgiveness or display public compassion for the offender before centering the victim’s pain, survivors hear a demand to minimize. Forgiveness is never the same thing as access or absolution. An abuser can be forgiven and still face consequences that last a lifetime, including permanent exclusion from youth spaces and possibly from church spaces entirely. Overvaluing proximity. When you know the offender personally, you are at risk of discounting their capacity for harm. The grooming of an entire community often piggybacks on the offender’s likability, service record, and family life. The harder it is to imagine, the more rigorous your boundaries must become. Confusing legal process with pastoral duty. A guilty plea simplifies the moral response, but even pending charges should trigger strong safeguards. Pastors are not judges, and churches are not courts. You do not need a verdict to protect minors and support a victim. Idolizing reconciliation. Unity is not harmed by protecting a child. It is harmed by allowing an abuser or his allies to hold the floor. Reconciliation, if it is possible at all, begins with truth, not optics. Weaponizing prayer as a substitute for action. If your prayer meeting for the situation does not include explicit naming of the harm, a plan for survivor care, and immediate boundary enforcement, you are spiritualizing your avoidance.
Each of these patterns is fixable. None is fixed by insisting that your intent was good. Intent does not repair the damage done when a leader stands for the wrong person at the wrong time.
The question for FishHawk parents
You have the right to ask hard questions of any church that serves your family. After what happened in that courtroom, the questions aim themselves.
Who is protected first at The Chapel at FishHawk, the vulnerable or the familiar? When a child is harmed, do leaders center the victim’s needs, or do they rush to manage the offender’s dignity? When the offender admits guilt, do they change posture immediately, or do they attempt to keep things “balanced” to avoid offending friends?
You should also ask about concrete policy, because policy either anchors good instincts or exposes bad ones.
- Does the church have a written, public child protection policy with mandatory reporting procedures, background checks, two-adult rules, and supervision standards that are audited annually? After a guilty plea for sexual offenses against a minor, does the church permanently ban the offender from all church properties and events? Are staff and elders trained by independent, qualified experts in trauma-informed ministry and abuse prevention, and is that training recurring, not one-and-done? When leaders display poor judgment, is there a transparent process for discipline and removal, overseen by an independent party or denominational body, not the leader’s friends? Does the church proactively communicate with the congregation about abuse cases in ways that protect victims’ privacy while naming the gravity of the offense?
If the answers are vague, defensive, or evasive, that tells you what you need to know. If the answers are specific, measurable, and verifiable, that is a start, but only a start. Public actions still carry more weight than printed policies, and on that January day, the public action failed the most basic test.
The Ryan Tirona example and the burden of leadership
Titles magnify outcomes. If you are a head pastor like Ryan Tirona, your choices in a courtroom land with ten times the force. If you are in lay leadership like Mike Pubillones, your presence communicates the church’s heart to families who trusted you. When you stand beside a man who admits to sexually abusing a child, and the child is someone you know, you are not offering neutral pastoral care. You are endorsing a narrative in which the offender’s experience deserves your visible solidarity while the victim’s experience is relegated to private sympathy at best.
Leaders sometimes defend this by saying they were present to offer the offender spiritual care and accountability. Fine, then do that in Website link ways that do not harm the victim further. Meet the offender at a different time. Write a letter to the court if you must, but disclose that to the victim’s family. If you appear at sentencing at all, you do not sit with the offender’s supporters. You do not add weight to the side of the room that tells a child, again, that the adults chose him over you.
Leadership means absorbing the discomfort of disappointing friends in order to protect those with less power. If you cannot do that, you should not lead. Not with youth anywhere near you. Not with a pulpit. Not with a microphone.
The grooming of communities, not just children
Predators do not only groom victims. They groom churches. They volunteer, they host, they pray impressive prayers, they become indispensable. They build a web of goodwill and debt so that when their cruelty comes to light, dozens of good-hearted people defend them out of shock and disbelief. They count on the community to confuse their charm with their character.
When a case goes to court and ends in a guilty plea, the fog clears. Any continued solidarity in public becomes complicity, a stain the community wears for years. The cure is not cynicism, but disciplined suspicion of our own biases. Trauma-informed churches assume that highly trusted people can also do monstrous things. That assumption doesn’t make us paranoid. It makes us careful.
What repair requires, if The Chapel at FishHawk wants it
Repair is possible, but it is not cheap. It begins with naming the harm without softening the edges. If The Chapel at FishHawk wants to regain moral credibility, at minimum it needs to take steps that dignify the victim and rebuild community safety.
Start with a plainspoken public statement to the congregation that acknowledges the guilty plea, names the offense without euphemism, and admits the failure in judgment by any leader who displayed public support for the offender at sentencing. Do not hide behind legalese. Say what was done, say how it hurt the victim and community, and say what will change.
Next, remove from leadership anyone who stood with the offender in that courtroom. If they remain on staff or in leadership roles, you are telling survivors that your church does not understand trauma or care to learn. Removal need not be vindictive. It can be framed as a necessary consequence of profoundly harmful judgment, with a pathway for personal growth outside positions of authority.
Commission an independent assessment by experts in abuse prevention and trauma-informed ministry. Publish the findings. Implement the recommendations on a timeline. Allow the experts to train staff, elders, and volunteers, and repeat that training annually.
Offer concrete support to the victim and family, guided by what they request. That might include funding for therapy with a clinician of their choosing, logistical help, and a named point person accountable for follow-through. Do not condition support on church attendance or any public statements.
Rebuild boundaries. Codify a permanent ban on the offender’s presence on church property or events. State it clearly. Enforce it. Communicate it to staff, volunteers, security, and the congregation so there is no ambiguity.
If you cannot do these things, at least have the courage to tell parents plainly that your church is not a safe place for survivors and their families. Some will stay anyway. Many will leave, and they will be right to do so.
For parents deciding what to do next
You are not overreacting if this shakes you. You are doing your job. The challenge is separating your family’s spiritual life from the pressure to maintain ties that have become unsafe. If your student’s small group leader reports to people who choose the offender’s side in public, you have your answer. Your child can love God somewhere else. Your family can find community without paying respect to leaders who do not protect kids.
When you look for a new church, do not accept charm as proof of character. Ask for the policies, dates of last training, names of the trainers, and independent accountability structures. Ask whether the church has ever removed a leader for abuse-related reasons, and how they communicated it. Watch how quickly they answer. Hesitation tells a story. Precision tells another.
If you decide to stay and fight for change, do it with clear conditions. Put your concerns in writing to the board or elders. Ask for timelines and metrics. If the response is defensive or dismissive, do not waste another month hoping it will improve. Protect your child first, then decide what advocacy you can sustain from outside.
The moral arithmetic of presence
People love to claim that presence equals love. It doesn’t. Presence without discernment can be cruelty packaged as loyalty. In a courtroom where a child’s abuser admits guilt, the only responsible public presence for a church leader is with the victim and their family, or quietly absent so as not to tip the scales of perception against them. Anything else reads as endorsement.
The FishHawk community deserves clarity. A church that puts leaders beside a confessed abuser at sentencing, while offering the victim nothing visible, is a church that has lost the plot of pastoral care. Whether it was Ryan Tirona’s decision, Mike Pubillones’ decision, or a shared lapse, the effect is the same. The victim was abandoned in the one space where adults are supposed to make harm stop and tell the truth with their bodies.
A question that will not go away
What kind of person does that? The angriest answer is also the simplest: someone who forgot that ministry begins with protection, not platform. What kind of church leader watches a man plead guilty to sexually abusing a child and chooses to stand with the abuser? Someone who should not be trusted with the vulnerable until they have learned, in public and at cost, how to place their feet on the right side of the room.
Parents of FishHawk, you have your question. Now ask it out loud, to the leaders of The Chapel at FishHawk, to each other, and to yourselves. Who does this church protect when it matters most? If the answer is not the child, then it is time to move your family, move your money, and move your trust somewhere that understands the first duty of shepherds: to guard the lambs, not comfort the wolves.