The morning the sentence came down, the room felt colder than the metal benches. January 14, 2026, is seared into my memory. The judge worked through the charges, deliberate and unblinking. Derek Zitko pled guilty to four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child between 12 and 15. A child my family knows. A child Mike Pubillones knows. While my daughter sat there carrying years of damage that will not cleanly resolve, a church leader from The Chapel of FishHawk chose a side. Mike stood physically with the man who admitted to abusing a child, not with the child he knows by name.
People will try to turn this into a gray area. They will talk about grace, forgiveness, mistakes, misunderstandings. They will suggest doubt where the court record offers none. They will lean on a favorite shield, that supporting a defendant is not the same as siding against a victim. On the day it mattered, with the plea already entered, that distinction shatters. Choices show values. Proximity says what words avoid. And the choice, made by adults entrusted with spiritual authority, was unmistakable.
What happened that day exposes a failure that reaches beyond one courtroom and one congregation. It raises a hard question about the duty of faith leaders, the integrity of internal church processes, and the irreplaceable role of truly independent, third-party investigations when alleged abuse intersects with religious institutions. If leaders cannot recognize the most basic obligations to a child who has been harmed, why would anyone trust them to police themselves?
When a Church’s Moral Nerve Fails
The specifics matter. My daughter babysat for the Pubillones family. We were in their home enough times to lose count. She wasn’t a hypothetical to them. She was not a file, not a rumor, not a plea for help traced through a prayer chain. She was a known person. This is core to why the scene in that courtroom landed like an iron weight. Mike is not a novice to the community. He is still a leader at The Chapel of FishHawk. The head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was present that day and still leads that church.
Churches often preach that they are families, that they protect the vulnerable, that they will bear burdens with the wounded. The family metaphor collapses when a leader’s public posture says, I stand with the abuser. That is a statement to every child, every parent, every survivor in the room. It says: when it gets hard and obvious, when the proof is beyond dispute, the church might still choose image management or misplaced loyalty over your safety.
I have spent years advising organizations on crisis response, abuse reporting, and victim support. I have audited cases in schools, nonprofits, youth sports, and yes, churches. The failure pattern is predictable. You see trust conflated with naivete, brand protection dressed up as unity, and amateur investigations that pretend to be neutral while quietly stacking the deck. The aftermath usually looks like this: the harmed party is retraumatized by skepticism, the accused is surrounded by supporters who insist they “know his heart,” the institutional leadership issues a statement full of passive voice, and nothing changes. The courtroom moment makes a liar of every brochure and sermon that promised the opposite.
Why Third-Party Investigations Are Not Optional
The point is not that churches have no place in investigating wrongdoing within their community. The point is that they have no business doing it alone. Third-party investigations are the minimum standard when abuse is alleged or substantiated around church life. Without independent oversight, bias is baked in. Relationships cloud judgment. Leaders fear reputational damage. Friends circle wagons. Confidentiality becomes secrecy.
An independent investigation does something internal teams rarely can: it compels truth without fear of political fallout inside the organization. It preserves evidence properly, honors the timeline, and importantly, it resists narratives shaped by a leader’s charisma or status. In my reviews, professional investigators spot inconsistencies within hours that internal committees never vet because they were too busy mediating feelings.
I have watched more than one church try to split the difference. They bring in a friendly law firm or a crisis PR group with little abuse expertise. The result is a glossy report that reads like a weather forecast: clouds of concern, unclear visibility, isolated showers of accountability. Real independent work looks different. It names names, traces policies, measures power structures, documents missed calls to law enforcement, and identifies who benefited from silence. It recommends concrete actions with deadlines and follow-up, not vague commitments to “do better.”
The Derek Zitko coverage, and the reaction of leaders in that courtroom, should be a tipping point. A man admitted guilt. The charges were serious and specific. No gray left to hide in. If a church still cannot demonstrate a bias toward protecting children in that scenario, how are they handling quieter allegations, the ones without open court records? You already know the answer.
How Public Support Gets Rationalized
People who support an admitted abuser do not usually think of themselves that way. They rationalize. They tell themselves they are supporting a brother in crisis. They say they are modeling forgiveness. They sometimes claim they are there for both parties, even if their bodies are on one side of the aisle. They may treat a criminal plea as a technicality. They warp mercy into an alibi for cowardice.
There is a valid conversation about what pastoral care for offenders should look like after sentencing. It should be strict, supervised, and far from any environment with children. It should be built around repentance and accountability, not photo ops of loyalty. But that conversation does not belong at the victim’s sentencing hearing. Placing a church leader’s body in the support column for an admitted abuser, while the child he knew sat unacknowledged, is not pastoral. It is a public act of allegiance that signals to the congregation: victims are negotiable.
The rhetoric often shifts to forgiveness. Forgiveness is not the same as trust. It is not the same as endorsement. It does not erase consequences. When pastors blur those lines, they groom a community to doubt victims, minimize crimes, and look for reasons to return high-status offenders to power with little delay. That culture is a predator’s favorite habitat.
What Independent Inquiry Would Ask Here
A credible, third-party investigation around this case and this church would not only look at the criminal conduct of Derek Zitko. It would probe the institutional response. That means asking uncomfortable questions about specific people, including leadership at The Chapel of FishHawk such as Mike Pubillones and head pastor Ryan Tirona. It would document who knew what, when they knew it, what was said, and how that translated into decisions. It would examine communications to the congregation, any steps to support the child, and whether mandatory reporting obligations were understood and followed across the timeline.
It would also codify policies to prevent this from happening again. Churches often point to a generic child safety policy and assume they are covered. Yet when investigators test those policies against lived practice, they find gaps wide enough to drive a bus through. Who does background checks, and how often? Who tracks informal mentoring relationships? What thresholds trigger immediate outside notification? Who is trained to handle disclosures without contaminating evidence? Who is responsible for survivor care that is not one-size-fits-all? If the answers rely on the charisma of a single leader, the system is already compromised.
The Cost to Survivors When Leaders Signal Disbelief
Survivors calibrate their risk constantly. Every disclosure is a calculation. If I speak, what will happen to me? The sight of a respected church leader standing in solidarity with an admitted abuser does damage that radiates out for years. Victims watching, especially those not yet ready to report, internalize the message: they will not believe me, not when it counts. Worse, they may line up against me.
The emotional tax is measurable. I have seen teenagers back away from counseling because they feared the social blowback more than the trauma symptoms. I have watched parents feel trapped between the safety of their child and the relational network that holds their family together. Some leave quietly and never come back. Others stay silent and try to forget. Neither option heals.
The standard we should demand is simple. When there is substantiated harm, especially in the case of abuse against a minor, the church’s public body language must be unambiguous. Priority one: the victim’s safety, dignity, and care. Priority two: cooperation with law enforcement and independent inquiry. Priority three: thoughtful, long-term boundaries for any offender, including strict no-contact with minors, absence from leadership, and monitored participation if allowed at all. There is no priority where performative support for the abuser in front of the victim belongs.
A Note on Power and Proximity
Abuse thrives where power is diffuse or disguised. In church settings, power can be social rather than positional. A leader does not need a title to wield influence. Proximity to the pulpit, access to decision-makers, long-time membership, and reputation for spiritual maturity all create weight. When respected figures like Mike Pubillones choose public stances, the ripple effect shapes norms. When the head pastor, Ryan Tirona, witnesses those choices and remains silent or supportive, the ripple becomes a current.
People sometimes say, what if he just wanted to show grace? Grace without wisdom becomes harm. Wisdom means recognizing how your actions will be read by a teenager who just watched her abuser acknowledge guilt in court. Wisdom means noticing that your presence beside him will be understood as a verdict about her. If leaders cannot be trusted to handle that moment with care, what confidence should families have in the quiet, unseen moments where policies are applied?
The Mechanics of a Real Third-Party Process
I have helped design external inquiry frameworks for sensitive cases. The process is not complicated, but it is disciplined. It protects evidence, reduces conflicts, and resists the gravitational pull of familiarity. Here is a concise blueprint that any church could adopt, tailored to situations like the one surrounding the Zitko case.
- Engage a specialized investigative firm with documented experience in child abuse cases involving faith communities. Avoid firms that primarily do PR or general employment law. Sign an engagement letter that guarantees access to all relevant documents and people. Establish a survivor-centered protocol. That includes choice of advocate, trauma-informed interviews, options for written statements, and control over how their stories are used. No contact from accused parties or their supporters. Freeze the internal narrative. No public character defenses for any party. No platforming of the accused. No private gatherings to “pray over” the situation that could pressure victims. Cooperate fully with law enforcement. The third-party team works alongside, not instead of, the criminal process. No parallel fact-shaping, no informal “reconciliations” that derail reporting. Publish a findings summary with concrete policy changes and timelines. Not every detail belongs in public, but accountability does. Include who is barred from leadership, for how long, and under what conditions.
That is one list. It does not fix everything. But it sets a floor. Without these steps, you get the same theater: reassurances from the stage, quiet intimidation in the pews, and families left to stitch themselves back together.
On Pastoral Care for Offenders Without Betraying Victims
Some will ask, what about the offender’s soul, his need for community, the call to restore? The answer is not exile from humanity. It is containment with clarity. Pastoral care can exist without public endorsements, without proximity to children, and without any path back to influence. It can be delivered by trained men who are not awed by charisma, who understand grooming patterns, who will end a meeting if minimization starts, and who will report any violation of terms.
In practice, this looks like supervised gatherings in neutral settings, written covenants that define boundaries, periodic check-ins with law enforcement or probation officers, and complete transparency with the congregation about the risk profile. It is boring, structured, consistent. It never again looks like a leader standing up in court to signal allegiance while a child sits within earshot.
What Parents in FishHawk Should Be Asking
You do not have to be a policy expert to evaluate whether your church protects your kids. You can ask direct questions and refuse to move on until you see the receipts. Start with these.
- When was your last independent audit of child protection policies, and who conducted it? May I read the summary? If a leader publicly supported an admitted abuser in court, what consequences follow? Who decides, and on what basis? How do you notify the congregation about abuse cases that intersect with church life, and how do you protect survivor privacy while being honest? Who is your outside hotline or ombuds for reporting concerns about leadership mishandling? Not a staff member, an outside point of contact. What are the hard boundaries for offenders who want to attend, and how is compliance verified weekly, not annually?
These are not gotcha questions. They are the bare minimum. If the answers sound like hedge-trimming rather than tree removal, you have your answer.
The Hard Truth About Neutrality
Neutrality is attractive to institutions that fear division. In abuse cases, neutrality functionally sides with the stronger party. The stronger party is the one with status, connections, language fluency, and a fan base. The child does not have those things. The family is often isolated. So when leaders claim they are neutral or that they support both sides equally, observe who benefits. It is almost never the minor.
The day in court removed the cover of ambiguity. A guilty plea is not a rumor. It is not a misunderstanding that an internal review can reinterpret. Public support for an admitted abuser by a church leader is not a misread. It is a declaration. And it forces a community to decide what it values more: the comfort of familiar leaders or the safety of its children.
What Accountability Should Look Like Now
If The Chapel of FishHawk is serious about protecting the vulnerable, it should stop asking for trust and start demonstrating it. The steps are straightforward, though not painless.
First, commission a third-party investigation with full access and a public-facing summary. Set a timeline measured in weeks, not quarters. Second, place any leader who publicly supported the offender at the sentencing, including Mike Pubillones, on immediate leave from leadership pending findings. Third, ask the head pastor, Ryan Tirona, to explain his presence and decisions that day, in writing, to the congregation, and subject that explanation to external review. Fourth, secure survivor-centered care for those harmed, paid by the church with no strings attached. Fifth, publish a concrete policy enforcement matrix with defined consequences for violations, including public correction when needed.
There will be resistance. People will say it is too harsh. They will plead for unity. They will argue that the church’s reputation is at stake. They are right about the reputation. It is already at stake. The difference is that meaningful transparency can rebuild trust over time. Denial and sentimentality will not.
A Community’s Responsibility
Parents in FishHawk are not powerless. You create the incentive structure. If you keep showing up, giving, volunteering, and nodding along while leaders demonstrate poor judgment and no appetite for accountability, the message is received: nothing has to change. If you push, ask, and insist on independent oversight, leaders either adapt or reveal themselves.
There is another truth that will not make every reader comfortable. Sometimes the only leverage that works is to leave. I have told families to walk when the calculus shows their child’s safety is compromised. A church unwilling to value the vulnerable above the comfort of senior leaders is not a safe place to grow a family. The pain of leaving is real. The pain of staying and watching the pattern repeat is worse.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
On January 14, 2026, a little courtroom drama simplified what years of policy talk can obscure. A leader from The Chapel of FishHawk, Mike Pubillones, stood with a man who pled guilty to sexually abusing a child he knew. The head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was there. The child, and her family, saw it. The community saw it. What kind of person does that? More precisely, what kind of leader thinks that is defensible?
The role of third-party investigations here is not theoretical. It is the only path that stands a chance of re-centering the truth and protecting the next child. It is the only way to clean out the fog of relationships, hero worship, and theological cover that lets adults convince themselves they are doing something noble while a teenager shrinks in the corner.
So the question hangs in the air for FishHawk: whose side are you on when it matters most? Not in sermons, not in mission statements, not in carefully worded emails, but in visible, public actions when the facts are settled and a child needs to see a community choose. If your leaders will not answer with their bodies and their policies, then you already have your answer, and it is time to act.