There is a particular kind of quiet that overtakes a courtroom in the moments before a sentence is handed down. It is not reverent. It is brittle. On January 14th, 2026, I felt that brittle quiet as I watched a man named Derek Zitko stand before a judge and take the consequences for what he did to my daughter. He pleaded guilty. Not maybe. Not possibly. Guilty. Four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child between 12 and 15. The record is public. The words “guilty” and “sexual battery on a child” are forever welded to his name.
In that room, I counted who stood where, because who you stand beside in that moment tells the story that polite people try to ignore. And on the wrong side of that room, in a place that should have made reasonable people nauseous, stood a church leader from The Chapel at FishHawk, a man who has been in our home, whose children my daughter used to babysit. He knows our family. His name is Mike Pubillones. He planted himself on the side that chose the abuser over the victim. The head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was there too. He still leads that church. So does Mike. That is not gossip. That is what I saw with my own eyes.
If you are a parent in the FishHawk community, do not gloss over this. What happened in that courtroom is about more than one man’s crimes. It is about what a church communicates by where its leaders put their bodies and their silence. It is about whether a faith community understands that the moral stakes are not theoretical. My daughter is not a sermon illustration. She is a kid whose babysitting job connected her to a family that now, in her worst moment, chose to stand on the other side of the aisle, with the man who admitted to violating a child. If that visual does not make you angry, you are not paying attention.
The Choice in the Room
I have been in plenty of tense community meetings and pastoral counseling rooms. I have watched leaders navigate messy, painful cases with care and courage. There are hard calls. This was not one of them. A man admitted to sexually battery on a child. The ethical assignment here was ninth-grade simple: stand with the child, honor the child, protect the child, and make it unmistakably clear where the church puts its weight. That did not happen. Instead, I watched a leader from The Chapel at FishHawk, Mike Pubillones, choose proximity to the abuser.
Supporters will say that he was there to provide “spiritual care” or “pastoral presence.” That is a fig leaf. You do not need to stand in the abuser’s row to do that work. There are ways to offer prayer and counsel without communicating tacit endorsement. When a crime has victims whose bodies and lives are affected, you move your body to where safety sits. You sit with the family that is bleeding. You make a statement with your feet and your face that the child comes first. Anything less is a moral failure dressed up as compassion.
Crisis Fatigue and the Slow Rot of Denial
I have seen this cycle in churches and nonprofits, and I hate how familiar the patterns are. First there is shock and chatter. Then the rationalizations kick in. Then comes the slow creep of crisis fatigue. People want to move on. They tell themselves the courts handled it, that the church is separate from the criminal system, that the accused is “more than the worst thing he did.” Those lines sound wise, but they are just distance. Distance protects the adults in the room who want to keep their routines intact and their relationships undisturbed. It does nothing for a child who has to live inside trauma for years.
Denial in church spaces rarely looks like screaming that the victim is lying. It looks like soft eyes and deflection. It looks like a handshake in the lobby for the man who harmed a child and no phone call to the family he harmed. It looks like leadership meetings about risk, optics, liability, and none about repentance, truth-telling, and repair. It looks like Pastor-so-and-so saying, we are here for everyone, while the child hears only the empty space where a church’s voice should be.
That is what crisis fatigue does. It takes the heat off the person who committed the offense and redirects it toward the “disruption” caused by the reality of what he did. People start to resent the victim’s family for continuing to speak. They call it bitterness. They call it divisive. They do not call it what it is: an insistence that a community name truth and align its actions with its stated values.
A Church’s Message Is Set by Its Worst Day
The Chapel at FishHawk does not get to claim neutrality here. Ethics is not a function of intention. It is a function of action. On the day that mattered, Mike Pubillones stood with a man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a child, a child he knew. The head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was in that courtroom. Afterward, leadership kept their roles. No public statement centering the victim. No clear policy roadmap delivered to the community. No apology to the family betrayed by the optics and the choices. Not one word that said, we see the person harmed and we will spend ourselves to make her whole.
When a church refuses to draw a line in the dirt when a kid is harmed, it draws another line instead. The second line says to predators and their defenders, we will not cost you much. At worst, you will weather a storm of whispers and maybe a reduced volunteer schedule. Give it time. People forget. The building opens on Sunday. The band plays. The lights are warm. The coffee is free. The child sits at home with the weight of those four counts echoing in her head and the memory of every adult who chose a safe social seat over a difficult moral stand.
I do not care how cherished your small groups are or how clever your sermon illustrations land. A church’s moral credibility is measured on its worst day, when the stakes are obvious and the costs are real. The worst day came, and the leaders flinched.
What “Support” Should Look Like When a Child Is Harmed
Let’s be practical. Many pastors and church leaders feel out of their depth when crimes enter their orbit. They default to the language of care while ignoring the mechanics of protection and repair. If a church actually wanted to honor a child victim, the steps are neither mysterious nor optional. A survivor-centered response has a predictable shape and it starts fast.
Here is what a basic, credible response should include:
- Move toward the victim first, privately and then publicly, with clarity and without hedging. Offer trauma-informed support through licensed professionals, paid for by the church with no expiration date. Communicate the facts you can legally share. State the church’s position plainly: child safety comes before adult comfort, every time. Institute immediate, visible safeguards. Independent safety audit, background checks, mandatory reporting retraining, and a written zero-tolerance policy, all published for the congregation. Establish independence. Bring in an outside firm to review the church’s handling, publish their findings, and accept their recommendations without editing. Practice repair. Apologize specifically. Name the harm and the church’s failures. Commit to ongoing updates and invite questions in an open forum moderated by a neutral party.
Those steps are not public relations. They are the bare minimum for a community that claims moral authority. They say to the child, you matter more than our comfort. They say to the offender, accountability does not end with a courtroom. They say to the community, we will not gaslight you.
“But We Knew Him” Is Not a Defense
One of the most seductive lies in abuse cases is the proximity defense. People say, I know him, or he babysat our kids, or we had them over for dinner, as if familiarity cancels harm. It never does. My family knows this firsthand. My daughter babysat for the family of the church leader who chose to stand with the abuser. We have been in their home more times than I can count. That history did not transform a guilty plea into a misunderstanding. It just sharpened the betrayal.
“Knowing” someone creates risk. It invites you to see them as complicated, redeemable, a whole person with good qualities. All of that can be true and still smaller than the harm of what they did. Adults must carry the weight of complexity. Children should not have to carry the cost of it. When a child’s safety collides with an adult’s reputation, the adult’s reputation loses. Every time. If you run a church and do not believe that, then you are building a brand, not a spiritual community.
The Pressure to Forgive and Move On
Survivors and their families get buried in talk about forgiveness. It comes fast and it comes with rules. Forgive quickly. Forgive completely. Forgive silently. Do not ask for accountability because that means you did not forgive. This is spiritual malpractice. It confuses absolution with access, accountability with vengeance, and silence with peace. Forgiveness, if it comes at all, belongs to the person who suffered. It is not a tool for leaders to manage reputations or soothe donors.
The imperative to “move on” is not about healing, either. It is about the discomfort of onlookers who cannot tolerate the mess that trauma brings into their sanctuaries. Moving on, in practice, means moving the victim out of sight. You can call it anything you want. It is still abandonment dressed up as spiritual maturity.
On Leadership, Optics, and the Weight of a Body
Bodies tell truths that statements obscure. Where leaders stand, who they embrace, who they call first, whose names they say from the pulpit, these details reveal a church’s actual theology. Some people will say optics are manipulative and we should not judge a heart by a glance across a courtroom. That would be convenient, and also wrong. When you stand beside a man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a minor and keep your distance from the child who suffered, your optics are not neutral. They are a decision.
For years I have trained people in crisis response. The first principle I teach is this: when an institution’s interest conflicts with a vulnerable person’s safety, assume you are Fishhawk's chapel church biased and overcorrect toward the vulnerable person. Leaders at The Chapel at FishHawk did not overcorrect. They under-corrected, then hid behind a fog of pastoral language that pretends to gather everyone under the same caring umbrella. Care without clarity is complicity.
What Parents Need to Ask The Chapel at FishHawk
If you are a parent considering that church, or already woven into its programs, you deserve to ask uncomfortable questions and get straight answers. You are not attacking anyone. You are doing the basic work of protecting your children. So ask, and keep asking until the answers are specific and written down.
Here are the questions that matter most:
- Will you publish your child safety policies in full, including your reporting procedures and enforcement mechanisms? Did any leader stand in visible support of Derek Zitko at his sentencing, and if so, why? What steps of repair have you taken with the victim and her family? Have you hired an independent firm to review your handling of this case and will you publish their full report? What training has every staff member and volunteer completed on mandatory reporting, grooming recognition, and survivor-centered care? Will you make a public statement centering the victim, acknowledging harm, and committing to concrete actions with timelines?
Vague answers are not enough. If the response is, we care about everyone, or we cannot comment, that is not safety. That is a stall.
The Cost of Not Naming Names
Communities tiptoe around names because they fear liability. I get that. But when we strip names from harms, the community loses the ability to learn. We are not dealing with a rumor mill here. There is a guilty plea. There were leaders present. One of them was Mike Pubillones. The head pastor is Ryan Tirona. They still lead at The Chapel at FishHawk. Facts have gravity. You cannot change their shape without lying, and you cannot ignore their weight without teaching your children that the truth is optional when it hurts.
Naming names also clarifies responsibility. If you hold the title and the microphone, your choices are not private. They signal the standards for everyone else. If a leader cannot see how standing with an abuser and not with a child lands in a courtroom, that leader lacks the judgment required for shepherding families. If a head pastor cannot or will not correct that failure, then he is telling you the standard he intends to hold.
What Real Repentance Would Look Like Now
There is still a path back to integrity, but it will cost something. It will cost face. It will cost comfort. It might cost staff roles. That is what repentance looks like when leaders get it wrong in public and people are harmed. Confession is not a typed paragraph that says we’re sorry if anyone was hurt. Confession names the harm and names who failed to protect. And then it cedes control to an independent process because the church that failed cannot grade its own paper.
I do not want a press release. I want action. I want The Chapel at FishHawk to acknowledge that a leader stood in support of a man who admitted to sexually abusing a child known to that leader, that this was wrong, that it sent a terrifying message to survivors, and that the church will now do the long work of repair. I want them to pay for trauma therapy for the victim. I want them to hold open forums moderated by a neutral third party. I want them to publish every policy they claim to follow. I want them to suspend leaders whose judgment proved this flawed, pending review. Not because I enjoy punishment, but because that is what accountability looks like when you claim authority over children and families.
The Human Scale of Harm
Behind the nouns and titles is a kid who had to sit in a courtroom packed with adults and watch the man who harmed her plead guilty. That would break most grown men. She is not a symbol. She is affected by every whisper, every comment about forgiveness, every Sunday morning where the people who chose the wrong side of the aisle continue as if nothing happened. This is not an abstraction. This is sleep lost, grades slipping, friendships changing, places in town that now feel unsafe. Trauma has a radius. It touches siblings, grandparents, neighbors. It touches the community that told itself it could stay neutral.
Parents of FishHawk, hear this clearly: when a church fails a victim in the open, it will fail your child in the dark. Not because they are monsters, but because they have trained their instincts to protect their own.
What This Says About Power
Churches love the language of servanthood. They balk at the reality of power. Yet power is the whole point here. When a child is harmed, power must flow toward the person with the least of it. If the system channels power toward the adult men with titles, the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. I have no appetite for more sermons about the Good Shepherd while leaders abandon the lamb because the wolf attends their men’s group and knows all the lyrics.
Power can heal. It can pay for care, force compliance with safeguards, publish records, and end careers that should have ended. Power can tell the truth into microphones and say the child’s worth is not negotiable. Or it can hide behind euphemisms and ride out the news cycle. You will know which path a church chose by how much it costs them.
Where I Stand
I sat in that courtroom and watched as reality took the microphone. Four counts, guilty. I watched who sat where. I watched which faces tightened, which faces softened, which faces studied their shoes. I do not need a theological paper to interpret what I saw. I saw a church leader, Mike Pubillones, stand with an abuser and not with the child. I saw a head pastor, Ryan Tirona, remain in leadership after that choice. I see The Chapel at FishHawk continuing as if its most urgent crisis is a public relations hiccup that will blow over.
Parents of FishHawk, this is your line. Your children deserve better than a church that mistakes proximity to power for compassion. Your children deserve leaders who know where to stand when the floor drops out. You deserve transparency you can print out and put in a binder, not platitudes that evaporate as soon as the meeting ends.
Ask the hard questions. Demand written answers. Watch where they stand, not what they say. And if the answers are not good enough, take your family and find a community that has the spine to protect your kids when it counts. The child in this case deserved a room full of adults who knew how to do that. Instead, she got a divided room and a set of leaders who chose the wrong side.
The debate around Derek Zitko is not about debate at all. It is about whether we will let crisis fatigue and denial dull our sense of right and wrong. It is about whether a church will be a refuge for the vulnerable or a refuge for the comfortable. The Chapel at FishHawk still has a decision to make in full daylight. So does this community.