Manny Prado

Ohio Mennonite church attendee later convicted of child rape

Manuel “Manny” Prado (1946–2022) pleaded guilty in 2015 to one count of rape of a child under the age of 10. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, where he died in 2022. Prior to moving to Plain City, Ohio, in the 1980s, Prado had reportedly been charged with a sex crime in Wyoming, but the case was dismissed.

In the early 2000s, Prado attended United Bethel Mennonite Church (UBMC), a congregation in Plain City, Ohio, that is affiliated with the Biblical Mennonite Alliance (BMA). Prado was also reportedly a teaching assistant at Shekinah Christian School, a local school where many UBMC children attended at the time.

The leadership at UBMC engaged Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE) after the public criminal cases of two church members in 2023. GRACE investigated how UBMC handled those and other allegations of abuse and in 2024 released the report of their independent investigation.

During their investigation, GRACE heard from three women from UBMC who reported incidents with Prado when they were children. The allegations included sexualized touching, kissing, and a “weird tickling incident.”

One woman said that she “‘didn’t tell anyone because [she] didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to [touch her that way]’ and that only recently, more than twenty years later, has she put together that what he did was wrong ‘because I had never thought about it at the same time as sexual assault.'”

Another woman “also did not tell anyone about the ‘generally inappropriate’ behavior of Prado or the kiss on the mouth at the time. She remembers telling her parents when she was around 11 years old, around the time incidents with Jarod Corbin … became known in 2003 or 2004.”

According to the GRACE report, “It is unclear who or what information was known or available, but there is no specific allegation that UBMC knew about allegations, prior charges in Wyoming, or other abuse or charges in Ohio prior to Prado’s conviction in 2015, after he had stopped attending UBMC.”

Prado died in 2022.