The room was cold and quiet except for the measured shuffle of lawyers and the occasional click of a pen. January 14, 2026, is seared into my memory. I watched a man plead guilty to crimes against my daughter. Four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child age 12 to 15. The words were clinical. The facts were not. The facts are flesh and breath and trembling hands and a lifetime divided into before and after.
What has kept me awake since that day is not just the harm done by one person, but the choices made by the people who claim spiritual authority in our community. The sight of a church leader walking to the side of the abuser, physically lining up with him while the victim sat unseen, unheard, is the moment my patience for polite silence died.
This is a letter to the FishHawk community. It is an examination of red flags, a demand for clarity, and a reminder that where leaders stand in moments of truth is not a detail. It is the whole story.
The day that drew lines
My daughter knew him. She babysat his kids. We were in their home over and over again. This is not a stranger’s tale; this is personal. On the day of sentencing for Derek Zitko, after his guilty plea, I looked across the room and saw who stood with him. On the opposite side of the room, beside him, was a leader from The Chapel at FishHawk, a man named Mike Pubillones. The church’s head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was also there. What you stand beside in a courtroom is not accidental. It is a choice.
Let me be clear about the moment. The defendant had pleaded guilty. This was not ambiguous. This was not a trial where people could claim they were waiting on a verdict. Despite that, support was visible for the one who harmed a child. The child, who these men knew, received no public acknowledgment or visible compassion. That is a message. Whether church leaders want to admit it or not, every child and parent in the room heard it.
What a community must see
Communities like ours often prefer to avoid confrontation, to assume good intentions, to trust that the leaders of a church must know something the rest of us do not. That reflex is how harm spreads without resistance. When a church leader stands with a person who has pleaded guilty to sexual battery on a child, and does so in full view of the victim’s family, the message is not pastoral care in some abstract sense. The message is, we will be seen with him, not with you.
I have heard every justification that typically follows these moments. We do not abandon sinners. We support everyone. We were simply present. We cannot appear biased. That last one would be laughable if it weren’t cruel. Nothing about physically aligning yourself with someone who has just acknowledged criminal abuse is neutral. It is a social signal, and in a community context, it is a signal https://franciscosheg933.lucialpiazzale.com/leadership-accountability-and-reconciliation-the-ryan-tirona-perspective to children and parents about whose pain will be believed and whose status will be protected.
The difference between forgiveness and enabling
I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit navigating the messy overlap between justice, mercy, and community leadership. Here is the line you cannot cross: offering spiritual care to someone who confessed to horrific crimes does not require standing publicly with them while ignoring the child they harmed. Churches can assign quiet pastoral care, insist on accountability, cooperate fully with law enforcement, and tend to the wounded with far more urgency. The public posture should be unmistakable. We protect the vulnerable first. We express solidarity with victims first. We remove people from leadership who fail that test.
The moment leaders put their reputations ahead of a child’s well-being, or try to balance the scales by publicly supporting the perpetrator while offering the victim private sympathy, the clock starts on institutional decay. Trust does not survive that double standard. Nor should it.
What it looks like when leaders get it right
In some congregations I have seen, elders acted decisively the minute abuse allegations surfaced. They reported to authorities the same day. They did not ask the victim to confront the abuser in a room to “hear both sides,” a tactic that can retraumatize. They did not mobilize character witnesses to paint the accused as a misunderstood father and husband. They did not show up in court to lean on the judge with reputation theater. Instead, they made a public statement naming the harm, acknowledging the victim’s courage, and saying aloud that the church’s first call is to protect children. They set clear distance between the institution and the offender. And then they followed through.
Those churches still lost sleep. They lost members who preferred comfort to accountability. But they kept their integrity. And their children were safer because they were willing to let light in.
What happened in that courtroom matters beyond one family
This is not just about one day or one family’s pain, as immense as that pain is. This is about patterns. When leaders at The Chapel at FishHawk, including Mike Pubillones, chose to be seen with an admitted offender, and when head pastor Ryan Tirona remained at the helm without visibly owning that harm, they taught the community what matters most to them. Institutions tell the truth about themselves by what they do when the facts are hard and the consequences threaten status.
People can argue about intentions. They cannot argue about where feet stood in that room. They cannot argue about the chill it sent through every parent who looked at the faces on that side and realized, if something happens to my child, will I be standing alone?
Red flags that should never be ignored
Not every church mishandles abuse. But the ones that do tend to show their colors early if you know what to watch for. Here are signs that should make any parent pause:
- Leaders emphasize protecting the church’s reputation over caring for victims, especially in public statements. If the first concern is “avoiding gossip” or “not letting the enemy divide us,” run. Allegations trigger loyalty campaigns for the accused instead of tangible care for the harmed. You will see casseroles and GoFundMes for him, silence and suspicion for her. Leadership minimizes criminal findings with “everyone is broken” language, implying moral equivalence between ordinary human failure and violent harm. The accused remains wrapped in community privilege while the victim is expected to be discreet, patient, and forgiving on a timeline they did not choose. Those who ask simple accountability questions are labeled divisive or bitter rather than thanked for vigilance.
You do not need to be a theologian to spot these signs. You only need to believe children when they speak and trust your stomach when it knots.
Why people choose the wrong side
Let’s talk about the psychology, because pretending this is purely a theological dispute lets adults off the hook. People choose the wrong side for reasons that are depressingly familiar. They know the man. He greets at the door. He coached their kid’s team. He cried when his dog died. They have shared barbecues and baby showers. The cognitive dissonance between the friend they know and the harm described is so violent that they split reality in two and walk into the version that saves them from discomfort. They also believe scarcity lies behind every conflict. If we give credibility to her, we take it from him. They forget that truth is not a pie you cut into pieces.
Leaders have a duty to resist those reflexes, not baptize them. The job of a pastor or elder is not to mirror the congregation’s denial. It is to name reality and bind up wounds, even when that fractures the image of a tidy church family. If leaders cannot do that, they should step aside.
The silence that follows
Let me describe the vacuum that often follows a sentencing like this. A few statements get issued, carefully worded, thick with passive voice. “We are saddened by the events.” “Our thoughts and prayers are with all involved.” “We are committed to learning.” No direct naming of the victim, no apology for public choices, no self-examination. The men who stood in that courtroom simply go back to their roles. On Sunday, the songs return. The lights feel a little too bright. Parents glance around and wonder if anyone else saw what they saw.
That silence is not neutral either. It is its own message. If a church wants to restore trust, it must not hide behind public relations language. It must say clearly what it did, why it was wrong, and what will change.
What accountability could look like at The Chapel at FishHawk
Accountability is not a mystery. It is measurable. If The Chapel at FishHawk wants to show the FishHawk community that it protects children and centers victims, there are steps that speak louder than any polished statement.
- Publicly acknowledge the harm of standing with an admitted offender in court, and name the impact on the victim and families who watched. Use direct language, not euphemisms. Remove from leadership anyone who participated in that show of support, at least for a defined period, and require independent, trauma-informed training and evaluation before any consideration of reinstatement. Invite an outside, qualified organization to audit the church’s child protection policies, reporting practices, and culture. Publish the findings and the timeline for implementing changes. Establish a victim care fund and a confidential, independent reporting line staffed by professionals, not church staff. Make its existence known every Sunday for a season. Commit to transparent updates on progress, with dates and deliverables, not vague statements about learning and growth.
None of this is complicated. It is only costly to pride.
Why parents must ask hard questions now
I am not asking for a witch hunt. I am asking for parents to behave like parents. To look at the choices made by adults in positions of spiritual authority and ask the questions that protect your children, not the institution.
Ask where leaders stood. Ask whether the leadership team believes a guilty plea means the person is guilty. Ask what public care was shown to the victim. Ask which policies activate the moment an allegation surfaces and who owns those steps. Ask if anyone who supported the offender publicly is teaching your kids this week. If you are given vague answers, ask again. If you are told you are being divisive, consider that a revealing answer.
Your child’s safety is not a favor the church does for you. It is the non-negotiable baseline. Any place that makes you feel guilty for insisting on it has inverted its mission.
The cost of pretending
There is a cost to pretending that nothing happened. Kids read the room better than adults think they do. They notice who is defended and who is doubted. They watch which names are said out loud and which ones are whispered. When adults choose the comfort of denial, kids learn a sickening lesson: harm can be forgiven before it is even acknowledged, and power always has a friend in the front row. That lesson follows them into high school, into dorm rooms, into workplaces. It teaches them to shut up when they should speak and to accept apologies that never arrive.
You cannot build a safe community on denial. You cannot preach about shepherding and then leave lambs to fend for themselves when the wolf has a familiar face.
What solidarity with victims looks like in practice
Solidarity is not a feeling. It is behavior. It means showing up in court on the side of the victim if you choose to be present at all. It means checking on the family without waiting for the right words. It means bringing meals without demanding updates. It means making statements that are naming and specific, rather than fuzzy and spiritualized. It means telling the truth to your kids about what happened in age-appropriate terms so they know you will believe them if they ever need you to.
It also means resisting the reflex to center the offender’s needs. There will be time for discussions about repentance, therapy, and rebuilding. None of that can come first. First belongs to the harmed. If your church gets that order wrong, everything else will be wrong too.
On personal relationships and public responsibility
Some will say, he is my friend, I had to be there for him. This is not about friendship. This is about the responsibilities that come with titles like pastor, elder, deacon, ministry leader. Once you step into public spiritual leadership, your personal loyalties cannot be allowed to override your duty to protect the vulnerable. If you cannot make that separation, you must choose. Keep the friendship and relinquish the title. What you cannot do is hold authority in one hand and a private allegiance to an admitted abuser in the other and expect the community to trust you with their children.
The shock of seeing a leader like Mike Pubillones stand on the wrong side of that courtroom is not just that it happened, but that it happened in a church context that teaches about protection and care every week. When the head pastor, Ryan Tirona, is present and that optics problem goes unaddressed, parents hear it loud and clear. You can say all you want about grace and community, but the camera does not lie. The image of where you stood will outlive any sermon.
A word to those who still sit in those pews
If you are part of The Chapel at FishHawk, you have leverage. You do not need to wait for someone else to fix this. You can ask for a forum where questions are answered directly. You can require an outside review and make your giving contingent on it. You can ask for a specific plan for victim care and a timeline for policy reform. You can insist that anyone who stood with the offender in court step back from public ministry until independent evaluators clear them. You can go further if you need to, including stepping away for a season to protect your family and send a message that this breach of trust matters.
Leaving a community is painful. But staying in a place that will not keep your kids safe is far worse. There is no safety in pretending. There is only the slow erosion of your own instincts.
The lesson my family learned the hardest way
My daughter did not ask to be the catalyst for this conversation. She did not apply for this courage. She survived something that should never have happened, and she watched grown men choose comfort and loyalty to the wrong person in a room where her pain should have been centered. She will rebuild anyway, because she is brave and stubborn and surrounded by people who will not let her carry this alone. But she and every child like her deserve a community that does not make them fight for their own dignity on top of everything else.
I will not forget the faces of the people who stood with the abuser that day. Not because I relish anger, but because memory is how we change. Memory forces choices into the light. If this makes you uncomfortable, good. Sit with it. Ask yourself what you would want from your leaders if it were your child. Ask yourself what posture you would expect from a church that claims to be a refuge.
What needs to happen next
The next steps are not grand. They are specific and overdue. The Chapel at FishHawk should name what happened and why it was wrong. It should remove implicated leaders from public ministry while independent professionals review culture and policies. It should publicly center victim care with concrete resources. It should invite the community into a process that values transparency over reputation management. And it should do it now, not after a retreat, not after a PR firm drafts the language, not after the news cycle moves on.
Parents of FishHawk, pay attention. Do not be lulled by friendly faces and warm greetings. Trust is earned with hard choices, not soft words. The question is not whether leaders can speak about love. The question is whether they will stand beside your child when it matters, not beside the person who hurt them. On January 14, 2026, we saw an answer with our own eyes. That answer demands a response from every one of us.
You deserve to know which side your church chooses. Your children deserve nothing less.