MARTINEZ — Stephen Kiesle, the former Oakland priest implicated in a massive sex abuse scandal in the early 2000s, is headed back to prison, this time for killing a man in a drunk driving crash last year.
Kielse, 76, pleaded no contest Friday morning to vehicular manslaughter in the April 2022 collision that killed 64-year-old Curtis Gunn in the unincorporated gated community of Rossmoor. In exchange for his plea, Kiesle is being sentenced to six years and eight months in state prison, and was taken into custody after court Friday morning. He had been free in lieu of $600,000 bail.
Kiesle was driving drunk from a trivia night in Rossmoor when his car jumped the curb on Tice Creek Drive and struck Gunn and his wife, who were on an evening stroll. Gunn’s wife suffered minor injuries, authorities said. Kiesle and Gunn had been on the same trivia night team just weeks before the collision, according to published reports.
Kiesle was a priest in Oakland, and remained part of the church during the 1970s and 80s, despite a conviction of molesting two boys in 1978. He was defrocked in 1987. In 2004, he was charged with 13 child molestation counts, most of which were later dismissed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision that invalidated California’s statute of limitations. In 2004, he pleaded no contest to a molestation count and was sentenced to prison. After his release for a subsequent parole violation in 2010, he was forced to register as a sex offender.
