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“He told me God loves me, this is what God wants, and it was time for me to become a man,” the witness told jurors.

Just days before the trial began, defrocked priest Edward Avery of the Philadelphia Archdiocese pleaded guilty to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and conspiracy to endanger the welfare of a child after admitting that he sexually assaulted the 10-year-old altar boy during the 1998-99 school year. Avery, 69, was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years.

Currently on trial are the Rev. James Brennan, who is accused of the attempted rape of a 14-year-old, and Monsignor William Lynn, who is accused of covering it up. Lynn is the first high-ranking church figure charged with child endangerment for shuffling predator priests from parish to parish.

Lynn, who was the secretary for clergy under former Philadelphia Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, is accused of knowingly allowing Avery and Brennan access to children despite allegations of sexual abuse of minors. From 1992 until 2004, Lynn was responsible for investigating reports that priests had sexually abused children.

Both have pleaded not guilty.

Before the witness described his ordeal, Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti showed jurors his grade school photo. The image of him with a small smirk and wearing a blue polo shirt and sleeveless sweater vest faced the jury as he described his extracurricular activities at a Catholic grade school in northeast Philadelphia.

The boy, now in his 20s, was in the fifth grade when Avery undressed with him in a small storage room, told him that God loved him, had him engage in oral intercourse and then ejaculated on him.

When asked why he didn’t tell anyone about the incident, he said he was “too scared.”

“I thought that I would get into trouble and that no one would believe me,” he said. “I thought I did something wrong, and, he’s a priest.”

The witness also alleges abuse by the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, who was a priest at the same parish, as well as by Bernard Shero, a teacher at the school. Engelhardt and Shero go on trial in September.

He described a life of substance abuse, a suicide attempt and a criminal history including drug possession that he testified came as a result of the sexual assault by Avery.

He said he did not tell anyone about the abuse until 2009, after a group therapy session for his drug use.

Although jurors were told that Avery is no longer on trial, they have not been told that he pleaded guilty. His guilty plea does not require him to testify.

Lynn’s defense attorneys argued earlier this week before Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina that they did not want Avery’s guilty plea entered into the court record out of fear that it would taint the jury.

Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington said that if the defense attacked the witness’s creditability, the prosecution would tell the jury that Avery pleaded guilty to the molestation only, and not to a conspiracy charge.

After the witness’s testimony, defense attorney Jeff Lindy, with less ferocity than usual, told the court he had no questions for the witness, opting not to cross-examination him.

A number of alleged victims of clergy abuse have testified since the trial began March 26, but Avery’s accuser is the first whose claim falls within a statute of limitations.

He is part of a 2011 Philadelphia grand jury report.

Sarmina did not rule Tuesday on whether or not to allow the jury to hear about the guilty plea and added that she would “wait and see” how the defense proceeded during cross-examination.

Before the former altar boy’s testimony, jurors heard from another former altar boy who said Avery molested him in the late 1970s.

Now in his late 40s, the man told jurors that Avery moonlighted as a disc jockey, spinning records at various events, from weddings to bar gigs.

When he was 15 years old, the witness said, he assisted Avery at one of his DJ gigs at a Philadelphia bar. While there, the boy and the priest were served large amounts of alcohol, and he eventually passed out inside the bar.

After the gig, Avery took him to a church rectory to spend the night, where they shared the same bed at the behest of the priest because the couch was “covered with clutter.” At one point, he said, he awoke to Avery’s hand on his genitals.

“I really didn’t know what to think. I really admired this guy. I hero-worshiped him,” said the witness, who is now married with five children and living in North Carolina.

During a ski trip to Vermont when the boy was 18, Avery slept in the same bed with and fondled his genitals, the former altar boy said.

“I felt betrayed, I felt unsafe, I felt confused,” he said.

He also broke down in tears as he read a letter he sent in 1992 alerting the archdiocese of the abuse, and a letter he wrote directly to Avery, while members of the jury looked away and instead followed along by reading the letter enlarged on courtroom monitors.

Despite the allegation, prosecutors say Lynn and other high-ranking church officials assigned Avery to the parish, where he had access to minors and where he abused the fifth-grader in the sacristy.

Testimony has been heated as teary witnesses have taken the stand, describing the alleged abuse by dozens of diocesan priests during overnight stays, at vacation homes or at parish rectories.

The trial has provided a rare behind-the-scenes portrait of one of the largest Catholic archdioceses in the United States, with nearly 1.5 million members. In addition to the graphic testimony, hundreds of pages of internal personnel files of priests accused of child sexual abuse — some of them confidential — are now part of the court record.

Two separate grand jury reports accused the archdiocese of failing to investigate claims of sexual abuse of children by priests.

A 2011 report led the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to criminally charge four Philadelphia priests and a parochial school teacher with raping and assaulting boys in their care, while Lynn was accused of allowing the abusive priests to have access to children.

Prosecutors also plan to call Monsignor Kevin Quirk to the witness stand next week. A West Virginia judge ordered Quirk to testify, noting he was a “necessary and material witness,” according to court documents obtained by CNN. Quirk presided over Brennan’s 1996 canonical trial for an alleged sexual abuse of a minor.

A gag order barring all parties involved in the criminal case from talking to the media imposed by a Philadelphia judge remains in effect.

Editor’s note: Yvette Walker is director of presentation at The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. She is also the E.K. Gaylord Media Ethics Chair at the University of Central Oklahoma.

I’ve experienced it firsthand: Random strangers have called me “n—-r” on a busy street in Indiana and in Dallas, Texas. So, I know the specter of hate when I see it.

Now it is hovering over Tulsa, Oklahoma, where police say Jake England and Alvin Watts confessed to shooting five people on April 6, snuffing out the lives of three and wounding two others. The two have pleaded not guilty.

This is a crime filled with hate, most certainly, but is this a hate crime? It took seven days for Tulsa County prosecutors to answer: Yes to charges of first-degree murder, with shooting with intent to kill and with malicious intimidation or harassment — Oklahoma’s equivalent of a hate crime.

For many black people in Tulsa, it was a welcome bookend to what was a very angry week.

Here’s what had been reported: Watts is white, and England has been identified as white and, in some reports, as Native American. All the victims that morning were black, and England’s father, Carl, was killed by a black man in a shooting tied to an attempted home invasion in 2010. England’s Facebook postings about his father’s death have fueled much of the speculation. Jake England is reported to have used a racial slur on his Facebook page, and then wrote, “It’s hard not to go off.”

The killings took place on Good Friday, and the men quickly were arrested on Easter Sunday. But as of midweek, many wondered why officials hadn’t called the shooting spree a hate crime. You know what they say: If it looks like a hate crime and smells like a hate crime …

There is a lot we don’t know about this crime. England is recorded in a video released by his lawyer saying he does not hate blacks and that he counts many black people among his friends. Some allegations say that England knew one of the victims. If that is true, how random were the shootings? Still, many others say the actions of choosing the people by their race clearly make it a hate crime.

Residents in the mostly black neighborhood in north Tulsa, where the shootings happened, and many officials in Oklahoma are convinced the charge is correct. In a recent media conference call with several black officials and ministers, state Sen. Constance Johnson, chairwoman of the Oklahoma Black Caucus, said she was concerned about crimes against blacks and requested that the federal government get involved in the investigation to send a message. “This is a powder keg waiting to explode,” she said.

Gwendolyn Fields agrees. Fields is executive director of the Advocacy Council, a group described as fighting for criminal justice reform in Oklahoma. She paraphrased the state’s intimidation statute: “A hate crime occurs when a person targets a person because of his or her (inclusion) in a group.” She added that the Advocacy Council talked to Tulsa police officials to express its concern.

Both Johnson and Fields said they are worried that such crimes are increasing, citing the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida and crimes against black people in Oklahoma during the past five years — perhaps the most grisly being the unsolved killing of the Rev. Carol Daniels in Anadarko, whose mutilated body was found in a church.

Johnson said these crimes are indicative of “a pattern of attacks on blacks here, not unlike the old South.”

Tulsa has a tortured history. In 1921, after a black man was accused of molesting a white woman, a mob destroyed Tulsa’s famous black business district. Greenwood burned. Hundreds died in the riots. After years of forgotten history, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 published its findings in 2001, referring to Tulsa’s “emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past.”

So, nearly 100 years after what clearly was a hate crime, religious leaders quickly met with Tulsa’s black community to discuss what’s been labeled another one.

I asked a colleague who lives in Tulsa for her opinion. Hate crime for sure, she said, but her reason was as eloquent and convincing as any I’ve heard: “People are targets just because of who they are, not what they’re doing or involved in. Therefore, until these suspects were caught, every black person in north Tulsa could logically fear that he or she could be shot.”

Now that the crime is officially labeled hate, people seem to feel justified. But another question lingers, as it does in the Trayvon Martin case: What does it matter if it’s officially called hate if the shooters are convicted of murder?

For 48 long hours beginning on Good Friday, Tulsa’s citizens felt that pain of bigotry, that sting of prejudice, that ache of fear. That’s enough to end the national debate and get on with it. Bring justice for these five Oklahoma families.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Yvette Walker.

“I fabricated everything about Bernie Fine,” Zachary Tomaselli, 23, told CNN from his home in Lewiston, Maine. He said he never met Fine.

“Basically, I’m a sociopath. I take a lot of pride in lying,” he said.

Tomaselli had told authorities that he and Fine watched pornography together in 2002 before Fine fondled him in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, where he’d gone to watch a Syracuse basketball game when he was 13 years-old.

In December, Tomaselli filed a lawsuit against Fine, but his attorney, Jeff Anderson, dismissed it weeks later.

“He’s a troubled young man who I hope gets help,” he said.

Tomaselli was among several who accused Fine of molesting them, leading to Fine’s being fired in November.

Syracuse ball boys Mike Lang and his stepbrother, Bobby Davis, also stepped forward to accuse the coach of molesting them over several years.

Prosecutors said in December that despite credible allegations from Davis and Lang, they could not bring charges against Fine because the statute of limitations had expired.

When the allegations first surfaced, Fine — married with a son and two daughters — called them “patently false.” He has not commented since.

Prison inmate Floyd “David” VanHooser also admitted making up abuse allegations against Fine, according to the Syracuse Post-Standard.

CNN has not previously reported VanHooser’s allegations because sources close to the investigation said they did not believe his accounts to be credible.

“In a statement I gave I told a lot of lies about Bernie Fine,” VanHooser reportedly wrote in letters, which are dated November 29. “None of what I said was true.”

John Duncan, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York’s Northern District, which has jurisdiction over the Fine case, declined to comment on Friday’s statement from Tomaselli.

Tomaselli, 23 is set to serve three years and three months in prison for sexually abusing a teenage boy in a separate case. He had pleaded guilty to those charges.

CNN’s Ross Levitt contributed to this report.

CNN’s Jason Carroll and Mark Norman contributed to this report.

(CNN) — Four people, including a police officer and the suspected gunman, were shot Thursday near Justin, Texas, authorities said.

The suspect was pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital, Jody Gonzalez, chief of emergency services for Denton County, Texas, told reporters. It was not immediately clear whether the suspect shot himself or was shot by the officer.

The officer was in stable condition, Gonzalez said, and he was alert and talking.

Authorities did not release the names of those involved. The suspect was a 29-year-old man, said Tom Reedy, spokesman for the Denton County Sheriff’s Office.

The incident began at 8:43 a.m. (9:43 a.m. ET), when authorities received a call of a suicidal suspect, Gonzalez said. As the officer was responding, a second call came in reporting that two people had been shot.

As the officer arrived, he was "met with gunfire" in the front yard of the home, Gonzalez said. The officer was able to call in after being shot, Reedy said. The suicidal suspect is the suspected gunman.

"This is a one-family situation that we’re dealing with," Gonzalez said. The suspect and the two initial victims were all family members, he said.

The initial two victims were flown to a hospital, while the suspect was taken to a hospital by ambulance and later pronounced dead.

The suspect was armed with a shotgun, Gonzalez said.

Justin is about 45 miles northwest of Dallas. Gonzalez said it is a small town, where "everybody knows who everybody is. It’s a tight community. This will have a major effect."

CNN’s Vivian Kuo contributed to this report.