Cheated out of justice: Sexual abuse survivors furious after accused Idaho doctor dies before trial

BOISE — Tom Croft feels cheated, betrayed and furious that he will never be able to face the doctor accused of sexually abusing him as a child.

Croft had a victim impact statement ready. The 30-year-old was prepared to take the stand in a courtroom, look directly at the man he says ruined his life and explain how what happened to him nearly 25 years ago drastically changed everything.

“I said they’d have to make sure there were 15 to 18 cops surrounding me and him because there was no guarantee I wouldn’t jump over and rip his throat out,” Croft tells EastIdahoNews.com. “I’ve been through so much abuse, but the pain he’s caused me has infected my entire life.”

Croft no longer trusts doctors, law enforcement or the legal system. He says he suffers from insomnia, PTSD, anger issues and has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a complex mental health condition caused by severe, chronic childhood trauma.

He was ready to explain all of this to Dr. Richard Pines at a trial scheduled to begin last month in Boise. But in September, Pines died of natural causes at the age of 66. His trial was vacated, leaving Croft with a painful void.

“I have so much anger in knowing the fact that Mother Nature came before he could really face justice. I feel extremely cheated because this never should have happened. He should have been put away behind bars and never released. I very much wanted to testify against him. I wanted to face this man in person and say my peace, and I wasn’t able to,” Croft says.

Visits to the cabin

Croft is one of multiple boys Pines groomed and sexually abused when they were younger, according to court documents. They were patients or foster children placed under Pines’ temporary state-appointed guardianship.

The doctor was well-known in the Boise area, working as a psychiatrist and medical director at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center. He also consulted with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and the Northwest Children’s Home in Lewiston.

“He had a lot of money. He had a lot of resources and was able to give off that he was a fun person who was able to help out,” Boise County Prosecuting Attorney Alex Sosa tells EastIdahoNews.com.

For years, Pines, a foster parent himself, offered to provide respite care for other foster parents who needed a break. The doctor reached an agreement with the Idaho Department of Health and would often take the young boys to his cabin in Garden Valley, Boise County.

“Whenever a child went into respite care … the department didn’t really seem like they had a solid program for that, so Richard Pines appeared to have offered to allow children to come into his stay,” Sosa says. “Whenever the children would go there, there wouldn’t be any supervisor or any check-ins. It was just him with the children.”

Pines would tell the boys to remove their clothes, and they would get into a hot tub together, according to Sosa. Afterward, he would allegedly give them massages and touch their genitals.

Shawn, who asked to be identified only by his first name, remembers spending a weekend at Pines’ cabin when he was 8 or 9 in the early 2000s.

“He was a nice guy. He was rich. He had all these fancy things. He lived above Boise and had a cabin up in the woods,” Shawn said.

Before meeting Pines, Shawn had been molested while in foster care. When he arrived at Pines’ cabin, he says the doctor “wasted no time.”

“He separated me from the other kids. He took me up to his room, and he had this jacuzzi and had me get naked. He massaged my legs, my thighs, he asked me all these questions, asked me if I was comfortable,” Shawn recalls. “In my mind, this was a normal thing. This is what grown-ups did. There were no real red flags popping up in my mind.”

After the cabin visit, Shawn visited Pines’ Boise home over the years and says he was molested around five other times.

“I thought it was normal. He told me he was a trained professional, and this was for his practice. He said he was doing this to get his hours in,” Shawn recalls.

Croft says Pines treated him several times in his office before he was invited to the cabin. The young boy had trouble sleeping, and the doctor said he had a cure.

“He gave me a medication that completely knocked me out. As I was lying down, I would lie on my left side, and he lay right behind me. As I started to nod out, he would grope me in the front area. I passed out, and when I woke up, my rear end hurt really bad,” Croft says.

Croft could barely sit for two weeks and struggled to walk. He didn’t know what happened, and as a 6-year-old, was confused why he was in pain. He tried to talk with his foster parents, but says they blew him off.

“I could barely walk. I couldn’t sit down and had to stand up, which got me sent to the principal’s office. I said I was in pain, but nobody gave a crap,” Croft says.

Croft never returned to the cabin, but continued to see Pines in his office for several years before moving to a foster home in Michigan.

‘Pages’ of alleged victims

Some of Pines’ victims eventually came forward, and in 2013, the Boise Police Department and Idaho Department of Health and Welfare contacted the Idaho State Board of Medicine to report that Pines had been accused of sexual activity with four foster boys, according to court documents.

The board investigated and revoked Pines’ medical license.

“Dr. Pines’ egregious conduct was so corrupt and degenerate as to shock the conscience, and (after) the many years of this entrenched behavior, the board determined that rehabilitation through treatment was not a viable option,” the board wrote in its order.

At the time, Pines was not criminally charged and appealed the Board of Medicine’s ruling. The case made its way to the Idaho Supreme Court, which ruled that only two of the four victims were Pines’ patients, and that, as a result, the Board of Medicine’s ruling wouldn’t apply to the non-patients.

The Supreme Court’s decision nullified the order revoking Pines’ medical license and returned the case to the Board of Medicine.

In 2015, the board agreed to consider issuing Pines a restricted license if he had treatment at an approved facility. If his license was reinstated, he would be banned from treating anyone under 18.

Pines received treatment, and two years later, in 2017, regained his medical license with a restriction barring him from treating minors. The order allowed him to request permission after five years to resume seeing underage patients, provided a second adult was present during all appointments.

In 2022, Pines asked to resume seeing children, and the board approved his request, provided another adult was in the room.

Over the next year, Croft and several other men reported their encounters with Pines as children, and in 2023, the Boise Police Department arrested Pines. Sosa, the prosecuting attorney, began working on the case.

“We saw there was going to be a large number of victims and people still coming forward, but because of the lack of record-keeping from the Department of Health and Welfare, we didn’t have a list of everyone who was involved in respite care and went to Mr. Pines’ residences,” Sosa says.

Sosa requested assistance from the Idaho Attorney General’s Office with the case, and Victim Witness Coordinator Aleshea Boals began tracking down potential victims.

“Some victims didn’t want to be a part of it, and that was their choice, of course,” Boals says. “Some of them were angry. Very angry. There was one who threw up the whole time. We had to meet in a parking lot because he was throwing up the whole time. It absolutely brought all sorts of feelings right back to the forefront.”

There were “pages” of alleged victims, according to Boals, but finding cases that could be proven in court decades later proved challenging.

Two Boise County grand juries ended up indicting Pines on five counts of lewd and lascivious conduct for acts that allegedly occurred between 2001 and 2008. Croft and Shawn were two of the victims included in the charges. They were initially hesitant when asked to testify, but ultimately knew they had to do it.

“Not coming forward is almost like saying, ‘Nothing happened, it’s OK.’ That then gives the perpetrators more of a cause to do what they’re doing to other people and not stopping it sooner rather than later,” Croft explains.

‘This never should have happened’

Pines never confessed to having any sexual contact with boys who were under 18. He was out of jail on bond when he died on Sept. 24, 2025.

When Sosa learned the news, he felt “gutted.”

“There are victims that the state was supposed to take care of. This never should have happened,” Sosa says. “They’re not set up in life in the way that everybody else is or should be. … In my mind, it certainly compounds the level of trauma because they were just kids when they entered the foster care system. These acts happened, and it really set them up in a worse manner for the rest of their life, to where they were not able to think properly, and they ended up committing their own crimes.”

WATCH OUR ENTIRE INTERVIEW WITH BOISE COUNTY PROSECUTING ATTORNEY ALEX SOSA HERE:

Shawn says that because of Pines’ actions, he has a hard time trusting authority. He developed a major drug addiction and life “has been an uphill battle from foster care going forward.” He committed crimes, served time in prison and finds it ironic that the man accused of sexually abusing him was not behind bars when he died.

“That pissed me off. He should have been rotting in prison and then died. He should have died in prison, and this should have been taken care of years ago,” Shawn says.

Croft agrees and wonders what would have happened if Pines had been charged and convicted over 10 years ago when the Board of Medicine learned about the complaints.

“There was evidence enough to put this man away. … I will never be able to have the life I deserve because of the deep-seated emotional and physical trauma I endured,” Croft says.

Moving forward

Sosa says improvements have been made over the years in the foster care program. Better records are kept and the whereabouts of foster children are documented.

“I think the system we have in 2026 is a lot of humans who work tireless hours to try to improve the lives of children and make sure oversights like this don’t happen anymore,” he says.

Even though Pines never went to trial, Boals continues to work with the victims, some of whom are taking advantage of the Idaho Crime Victim Compensation. It pays for counseling and other services “to deal with the demons that had been haunting them.”

“When you go through the criminal justice system, the justice doesn’t come in the courtroom. It comes through healing. It comes through you. Healing may take a long time, but the healing does come if you allow that to start happening,” Boals says.

WATCH OUR ENTIRE INTERVIEW WITH VICTIM WITNESS COORDINATOR ALESHEA BOALS HERE:

Shawn is now married and working on moving forward with the support of his wife and kids. He encourages other sexual abuse victims, especially men, to come forward and not feel shame.

“I knew what he did was wrong, but I still didn’t come forward. I should have come forward,” he says. “You could be saving more people by coming forward and saving somebody down the road.”

Croft ended up in 260 foster care homes by the time he was 18. He credits one of his foster moms named Rachel for saving his life. He now lives with his grandmother.

He’s working on trusting others and wants to help other men who have been victimized.

“As I grew older, I realized what he did and I kept it in. I think if I had come forward a lot sooner, even with the damage that had already been done, it would have helped a lot more. I get it’s not comfortable, but come forward,” Croft says.