Former Woodstock church volunteer pleads guilty to grooming 16-year-old he met through church

A Woodstock man has pleaded guilty to grooming a child he met at a local church where he was a volunteer youth leader.

Patrick O’Farrell, 57, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of grooming, a Class 4 felony, and was sentenced to two years in prison and fines. In exchange for the guilty plea, additional charges were dismissed, including aggravated criminal sexual abuse of a victim ages 13 to 16, a Class 1 felony; additional grooming charges; and aggravated criminal sexual abuse when an offender is in a position of authority or trust, according to the judgment order filed in McHenry County court and signed by Judge Mark Gerhardt.

O’Farrell is required to serve half his prison term followed by six months of mandatory supervised release. He also must register as a sex offender, according to the order. Gerhardt allowed O’Farrell to turn himself in at the McHenry County jail June 1, according to the court order.

His attorney, Assistant Public Defender Richard Behof, said O’Farrell has little to no criminal background.

Authorities had alleged that from June through November 2022, O’Farrell sexually abused a 16-year-old girl, described by a prosecutor at O’Farrell’s initial court hearing as “troubled.” Prosecutors said he touched and kissed her while driving in his vehicle and at his home, where she sometimes slept.

The girl had looked to O’Farrell and his wife for support and viewed O’Farrell as a father figure, Assistant State’s Attorney Anthony Marin said at the hearing in arguing that he be detained pretrial. However, he was released with conditions.

At the time of the allegations, O’Farrell was a volunteer youth leader at Grace Fellowship Church in Woodstock, and he met the girl through the church, prosecutors said.

Marin described allegations that O’Farrell grabbed the girl’s hand, kissed her, touched her leg, made sexual statements to her and commented about her body. Marin said O’Farrell asked his wife if the girl could live with them.

The girl reported the alleged encounters first at church and then went to police when she thought church officials were not handling the situation adequately, Marin said.

Authorities said O’Farrell had confessed to some of the alleged incidents to some church leaders and made “incriminating statements” to police. Cellphone records showed that from July to November 2022, there were more than 380 phone calls between O’Farrell and the girl, equaling 247 hours of conversation, Marin said.

At the time of O’Farrell’s arrest, the Rev. Robbie Davis confirmed that O’Farrell had been a volunteer youth leader at the church and that he no longer was part of the church. Davis declined to comment further but said the church takes “child safety very seriously, and we do background checks on all volunteers.”