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Homer Bishop, 41, remained held without bail in the Bergen County Jail, where he was brought Tuesday after being extradited from Jamaica.
He was captured by U.S. Marshals there, thanks to tips received by Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino’s office.
Superior Court Judge Edward A. Jerejian denied bail for Bishop following a brief hearing this morning.
The 5-foot-9-inch, 182-pound Bishop was living in Paterson and working at Frisch Yeshiva High School in Paramus when he was arrested in June 2006 and charged with sexually assaulting the girl — who authorities said wasn’t a student there — several times over the previous year, beginning when she was 12.
Separated from his wife at the time, he’d worked at the private school for roughly three years, authorities said at the time.
A judge originally set bail at $300,000 but defense lawyers got it lowered to $80,000 — which Bishop posted in October 2006, four months after his arrest, records show.
An investigation by the county Special Victims Unit and Lodi police found that Bishop “had been having forced sexual encounters over a period of approximately one year” with the girl, beginning when she was 12, before she “finally disclosed the abuse to her mother, who reported it to the police,” Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said yesterday.
After copping a plea to aggravated sexual assault in August 2007, Bishop skipped a November sentencing in Hackensack and fled, court records show.
His image and information were subsequently posted on the Bergen County Sheriff’s Most Wanted list.
The sheriff’s office received an anonymous tip in 2010 that Bishop had gone to Jamaica. It wasn’t specific enough to locate him, but another tipster in 2013 put him in Kingston, with added details, Molinelli said this morning.
Molinelli said the arrest was the culmination of work by his detectives, the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office, the Marshals and the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs “which was involved in the approval and submission of the warrant for extradition to Jamaican authorities.”
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