Tears streamed down the cheeks of former Hudson pastor Tom Randall last month as he recounted what happened after a 2014 human trafficking raid at an orphanage he and his wife, Karen, founded in the Philippines.

Randall was arrested on charges of obstructing the investigation and released 22 days later. Charges against him were dropped, but the scandal lingered until leaders of Christ Community Chapel (CCC) asked him to resign in June.

Two months later, CCC released a 27-page report written by a former FBI agent and church member that concluded sexual abuse likely happened at the orphanage and that Randall hadn’t been honest with church leaders.

Until now, Randall — who has never been accused of sexual wrongdoing at the orphanage but of protecting those who were — declined to speak publicly about his departure from the church or the CCC report’s findings.

But he and his wife, accompanied by three men who support them, agreed to meet with a Beacon Journal reporter last month at their home in Stow.

Boxes were already packed for a planned move out of state, but photos of the Randalls still hung on the walls, illustrating many of their Christian mission trips across the U.S. and Philippines over more than 30 years before everything came crashing down.

“We tried to ignore it,” Tom Randall said. “We have nothing to defend and we’ve done nothing wrong.”

‘We love our church’

Randall, 65, said he was the victim from the moment Filipino authorities raided the orphanage in 2014 until his departure this summer from the CCC, which cast him out but held on to more than $3 million that Randall’s now-defunct charity brought to the church. Randall and his wife had planned to use the money to continue their mission work.

Yet the Randalls hold no bitterness for the 4,000 people who attend CCC weekly or their lead pastor, Joe Coffey, who steadfastly defended Randall before abruptly changing his stance in August.

“We love our church and we love Joe Coffey,” Randall said.

Randall instead blames his troubles on Joe Mauk — Randall’s longtime best friend, business partner and fellow Christian missionary in the Philippines.

Mauk, Randall said, had a falling out with the man Randall paid to run the orphanage and to distribute cash payments from Randall’s nonprofit World Harvest Ministries to other Christian missions in the Philippines, and things spiraled downward from there.

The Beacon Journal last month also met separately with Mauk. He lives in the Philippines but was in Tallmadge visiting a cousin who once attended CCC. His cousin said she left the church after Coffey and other CCC leaders refused for years repeated attempts by her and others to acknowledge court records and other documents from the Philippines that contradicted Randall’s account of what happened at the orphanage.

Under increasing pressure, CCC late last year hired the former FBI agent who ultimately relied on many of those same documents to conclude sexual abuse likely happened at the orphanage.

Mauk said that he never had an issue with the man who ran the orphanage — Toto Luchavez — until he learned of the abuse allegations against him.

“I think Toto was afraid of me and may have been poisoning Tom’s mind against me,” said Mauk, who for decades considered Randall closer to him than a brother.

Now Randall is trying to make Mauk the villain of his own story, Mauk said.

“But all I’ve done is tell the truth,” Mauk said.

Allies in Philippines

Northeast Ohio probably never would have known anything about Sankey Orphanage and the abuse allegations 8,000 miles away if CCC’s Coffey hadn’t recruited Randall to work part time at the Hudson megachurch.

Neither Randall nor Mauk have any close ties here. Randall and his wife moved from Oklahoma to Stow to work at CCC in 2013 just a couple of months before the orphanage was raided and Randall was arrested. Mauk’s only local tie is his cousin who once attended CCC.

But Randall and Mauk’s connection is strong and goes back about 30 years.

They met in the Philippines while working on separate nondenominational Christian missions. Randall was part of a sports ministry that traveled the country doing basketball camps, which sometimes stopped at Bible schools where Mauk worked.

Randall met Toto Luchavez about the same time after watching him fighting spiders, a popular and brutal sport among many rural children in the Philippines.

Luchavez kept his fighting spider in a sort of matchbox. When he slid back the lid, a spider, with a string tied around one of its legs, would crawl onto his hand, Randall said.

Children prod their spiders to fight each other to the death. And Luchavez and his spiders were very good, Randall said.

“I thought this guy, if he could do this, he could be wonderful,” Randall said.

He first paid Luchavez to work as his caddy, then to wash his car.

“Toto was honest and hardworking” and very poor. When Randall won a refrigerator he couldn’t use, he offered it to Luchavez, who was thrilled. But what Randall hadn’t realized, he said, was that Luchavez didn’t have electricity, so his family used the refrigerator as a closet to store clothes.

Randall said he taught Luchavez English and how to drive a car before ultimately putting him to work as a sort of bodyguard and money man.

“There’s a lot of danger in what we do,” Randall said because people perceived to have money in the Philippines are often robbed or extorted.

Randall said his mission has spent millions in the Philippines over the years and all of it in cash “because that’s the way people do business.”

Luchavez started out accompanying Randall to the bank as a guard and ultimately — sometime after Randall and his wife launched the orphanage around 1998 — Randall’s point person for both the orphanage and Randall’s other work in the Philippines when Randall was living full time in the U.S.

Abuse allegations

Sankey Samaritan Orphanage didn’t operate like many orphanages.

About 30 children who lived there were not put up for adoption.

Most of the kids came from nearby families, but ended up at the orphanage because their families couldn’t afford to feed or care for them or because they were abused.

Tom and Karen Randall said they decided, when they reached maximum capacity at the orphanage under Philippine law, to care for the group of children until they were through high school and college.

“Our goal was to raise young men and women who loved the Lord, were patriotic to their country and who gave back” to society, Karen Randall said.

In 2013 — when allegations of sexual abuse first arose — many of the children who lived at the orphanage were teens or young adults.

Mauk said he learned about the complaints from one of his adult daughters after a child there confided in her.

He telephoned Randall with the disturbing news. He said he was fully expecting his best friend to handle it, but also advised Randall against telling Toto Luchavez — who was accused of forcibly kissing wards of the orphanage — fearing the Luchavez would coach the children on what to say to authorities or worse, retaliate against them.

Randall, who wasn’t scheduled to return to the Philippines for six weeks, said he took immediate action. He notified Philippines children’s services about the allegations and, against Mauk’s advice, he also told Luchavez.

“I told him he could do office work, but no working with the kids,” Randall said, adding that further complaints could have been filed if he hadn’t told Luchavez.

Randall arrived in the Philippines as scheduled and he, Luchavez and Luchavez’s son were arrested during a raid that removed all of the children from the orphanage a couple of weeks later.

‘I feel damaged’

In Hudson, Coffey immediately came to Randall’s defense, rallying CCC to prayer and action for Randall even though, within days, Mauk’s cousin said she started warning Coffey and others that there was more to the orphanage allegations than Randall was telling them.

Coffey for years dismissed those concerns, even after several women started standing outside the church on Sundays holding signs seeking justice for the orphanage. The women also launched a website — justiceforsankey.com — carefully documenting the abuse allegations and both the responses of Philippine authorities and CCC.

Finally, under outside pressure from Greater Akron’s Christian community, CCC leaders hired church member and former FBI agent Suzanne Lewis-Johnson to review what happened in the Philippines.

The Randalls thought the matter should have ended when a judge in the Philippines dropped all charges in the case. But they agreed to meet with Lewis-Johnson in November and again in January, hopeful her review would finally fully exonerate Tom Randall.

“It was awesome. It was great,” at first, Randall said. “We felt like we were on the same page.”

But in June, CCC leaders asked Randall to resign after those seeking justice for the orphanage discovered Randall had faked an email supporting his version of what happened in the Philippines and given it to the church in someone else’s name.

“I made a mistake and ... I’m sorry about that,” Randall said about the email.

The mood had changed in August when CCC leaders visited the Randalls’ home to tell them Lewis-Johnson had finished her review. “It was like they were at a funeral,” Randall said.

The Randalls asked if they could make changes or additions to the review, but church leaders declined and told them the review had already been shared with the Beacon Journal/Ohio.com, the Randalls said.

They said Lewis-Johnson failed to contact some of the people in the Philippines the Randalls had suggested to her, people who could vouch for them. They also said they suspect Lewis-Johnson believed everything Mauk told her, information the Randalls said was entirely thirdhand or not completely true.

Mauk stands by his account, saying it is backed up by court records, children's services records, affidavits and others.

He said he’s satisfied the orphanage is closed and Philippine law will forever ban Luchavez and his son from working with children.

The Randalls said they plan to spend the next few months traveling across the U.S. meeting with supporters of their former nonprofit — World Harvest Ministries — to gain support for their newly forming nonprofit called Revelation 12:11.

The name refers to a Bible verse that reads: “They triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

“I feel damaged by what has happened,” Tom Randall said.

“But I never felt the Lord didn’t love me,” he said. “Me and Jesus, me and Karen, we’re good.”

Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @agarrettABJ.