The ugliest part of institutional betrayal is how clean it tries to look. Policies get waved around like shields. Leaders say the right words into microphones, then do the opposite when it counts. You see the truth in the room, not in the press release. And on January 14, 2026, in a courtroom where a man named Derek Zitko pled guilty to crimes against a child, the truth did not hide. It stood there, in plain sight, on the wrong side of the aisle.
This is not a theoretical debate about church governance or leadership best practices. It is a blunt picture of what happens when an institution trusts its own internal review instincts more than it trusts the moral clarity of accountability. The illustration is simple, brutal, and personal. A child was harmed. A man admitted guilt. And a church leader from The Chapel at FishHawk, a man named Mike Pubillones, chose to physically stand in support of that guilty man. Standing with him, according to direct observation, was the church’s head pastor, Ryan Tirona.
The victim in this case is not an abstraction. She is a daughter, a neighbor, a babysitter who knew the family of the church leader who chose the other side that day. She watched those choices happen in the same room where the person who abused her pled guilty. If you want to understand why internal reviews fail, start in that courtroom. Look at where people plant their feet when nobody is writing a statement and no committee is convened. That is the real policy.
What “standing with” communicates
I have worked with organizations that handle allegations of abuse, misconduct, and complex harm. I have watched good leaders restrain their personal impulses and act according to a simple hierarchy: protect the vulnerable first, remove the risk second, support due process for all while never signaling that the victim stands alone. When a leader steps into a courtroom, body language and proximity speak louder than anything. Standing with a defendant who has pleaded guilty to multiple counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child is not pastoral neutrality, it is alignment. When the child is personally known to the leader, that alignment becomes an indictment of judgment, priorities, and fitness to lead.
Churches often rationalize this sort of presence as a ministry to the fallen, an act of forgiveness, or a show of grace. That framing collapses under the weight of context. Grace does not require you to isolate or abandon the victim. Forgiveness does not require theater in a courtroom. Pastoral care can happen privately without choosing a side in public. There is a difference between visiting someone in jail and stepping into a courtroom and sending a message to a community that the church stands with the abuser. People can split hairs all day. Parents will not. They will see who showed up for their child.
The message to the FishHawk community is harsh but clear. If your child is abused, do not expect moral courage from everyone who wears a title. Expect some leaders to protect the brand, to shepherd optics, to reassure donors, to console the person who committed the harm, and to leave your family to carry the weight. That is what happened in that room.
Where internal reviews go to die
Internal reviews almost always fail at the same pressure points:
First, conflict of interest. When reputations, friendships, or institutional stability are on the line, insiders cannot evaluate facts with clean hands. If the alleged or admitted offender is a friend, a volunteer, a donor, or a colleague, the review starts compromised.
Second, reverence for the wrong things. In faith settings, people elevate “unity” and “grace” over accountability. They talk about restoration while the victim is still bleeding out. The optics become a sermon illustration rather than a duty of care.
Third, secrecy framed as prudence. Leaders hide behind privacy or ongoing legal matters to avoid public clarity, then leverage that silence to buy time and manage rumor. Meanwhile, vulnerable people absorb the uncertainty alone.
Fourth, performative neutrality. Body in the courtroom with the abuser, voice in the pulpit saying, “we support everyone.” That is not neutrality. It is calculated ambiguity that leaves victims without institutional cover.
Fifth, no independent oversight. You cannot review your own failure. If you tried to fix an airplane you crashed, nobody would get on board. Churches do it weekly, telling themselves that prayer and a committee substitute for expertise.
In the Derek Zitko case, the moral reality was already settled in court. Guilty pleas are not ambiguous. If internal reviews at The Chapel at FishHawk exist, their first test would be simple: does leadership understand the optics and the harm of standing with a man who pled guilty to sexual battery on a child while offering no public acknowledgement of the victim’s dignity and safety? If the answer is yes, then why did they choose to do it? If the answer is no, they are not competent to lead through a crisis.
The names matter because the choices matter
The story here names people because their roles matter. Derek Zitko pled guilty to multiple counts, and nobody is guessing about that. The decisions of specific leaders at The Chapel at FishHawk matter because they carry authority in a community full of children and parents who trust them. The fact that Mike Pubillones knew the victim, through prior family contact and babysitting, increases the weight of his choices. The fact that head pastor Ryan Tirona was there that day raises questions about what the church’s posture truly is when push becomes shove. This is not mob justice, it is community oversight. Parents are supposed to ask hard questions of the people who shape their kids’ spiritual formation.
You can stare at a doctrinal statement all day, then watch it unravel in seconds when people are under pressure. Core beliefs, values, and covenants are only as trustworthy as a leader’s reflex in a crisis. That reflex revealed itself in a courthouse. No internal review can erase it.
What it feels like to the victim and the family
There is no guidebook for sitting in a courtroom and watching a person who abused your child plead guilty while your community leaders take their seats next to him. The brain tries to make sense of it. Maybe they misunderstood. Maybe they think they are doing the right thing. Maybe they don’t know the details. That mental gymnastics is a second injury. The family knows they are being evaluated, weighed, and found inconvenient. The victim receives a message that the adults who hold microphones will offer compassion to her offender in public, but not to her. She is forced to carry her story alone, often doubting her own perception. That is how institutional betrayal multiplies trauma.
And here is the bind: even if leaders later say the right words, the image is already stamped on the mind. The body remembers who stood where. That cannot be undone by a statement.
The theology problem that masquerades as compassion
In church circles, people often defend this posture with a familiar script. They talk about Jesus eating with sinners, the call to forgive, the need to avoid “sides.” They frame courtroom presence as a ministry of presence, a show of hope that even the guilty can be redeemed. Those ideas, taken alone, are fine. Applied here, they become a shield for irresponsibility.
Sound pastoral practice makes distinctions. Forgiveness is never leveraged to minimize harm. Redemption does not require re-platforming, public solidarity, or silence around abuse. Most of all, shepherds protect sheep. If you step between a wolf and a lamb, you do not wink at the wolf and tell the lamb to be gracious. You remove the wolf and kneel beside the lamb. You do it in public, so the flock understands what safety looks like.
If a church wants to minister to a guilty man, it can do that without any display that undermines the victim. Pastoral care can be private, boundaries can be strict, law enforcement can be respected, and communication with the congregation can put safety first. That is what responsible churches do when they understand both trauma and optics. When leaders choose visibility with the offender and invisibility with the harmed, they are not practicing compassion, they are advertising priorities.
The community lens: what parents see
Parents in FishHawk do not have time for theological hair-splitting. They want to know whether their church will keep their kids safe and whether leadership understands the gravity of sexual abuse. They will measure that by pattern and posture.
The pattern matters. If the leaders at The Chapel at FishHawk, including figures like Mike Pubillones and Ryan Tirona, show up on the wrong side of a courtroom when the guilty plea is on the record, what will they do in the fog of allegation? If they cannot read the room when the facts are already adjudicated, how will they handle intake, reporting, and communication when facts are still emerging?
The posture matters more. Do they center the safety and dignity of children in public, visible ways? Do they communicate clearly with the congregation about policies, reporting channels, and survivor support? Or do they default to opacity, vague platitudes, and behind-the-scenes relationship management? Parents can tell the difference. You do not need an investigative committee to read a room.
What a real, independent response looks like
If a church is serious about protecting children and rebuilding trust after a failure of judgment, it does not launch an internal review staffed by friends and elders who were already part of the decision-making culture. It hires an independent firm with expertise in abuse response. It gives that firm full access to policies, emails, texts, calendars, and staff interviews. It grants them autonomy to publish executive findings to the congregation, including specific failures and corrective actions. It sets timelines and metrics. It bars implicated leaders from influencing scope or messaging.
It also creates a survivor support protocol that does not require the victim to ask for help. It pro-actively offers to fund counseling with trauma-informed, third-party clinicians the family chooses. It covers those costs for a meaningful period, not a token number of sessions. It establishes a point person trained in trauma who keeps the family informed, answers questions, and advocates internally for any needed safeguards, without asking the family to repeatedly disclose or perform their pain.
Finally, it refrains from public displays that telegraph solidarity with the offender. Visit in private, under strict boundaries, if at all. Communicate to the congregation that the church unequivocally stands with the harmed, that it cooperates with law enforcement, and that it will place safety and accountability above relationships and reputations. That is not cruelty toward the offender. That is moral clarity toward the community.
The cost of getting it wrong
When churches mishandle abuse, the cost spreads. The victim absorbs the largest share, often for years. Families lose trust and leave quietly. Survivors already in the pews who never told their story see a warning and clam up. Volunteers stop stepping forward. Good staff members burn out, or resign rather than be part of the spin cycle. Insurance costs go up. Reputation frays. Most critically, the signal sent to potential offenders is that the institution is naive and easily manipulated by contrition, proximity, or charisma.
It only takes one courtroom scene like this to reset a community’s instincts. People notice who stands where. Parents will ask each other on fields and at school pickup whether The Chapel at FishHawk can be trusted with their children. They will mention names, including Mike Pubillones and Ryan Tirona, because names anchor accountability. They will ask whether leaders who showed overt support to a man who pled guilty to sexual battery on a child are fit to shepherd. Those are fair questions. They are necessary questions.
What would genuine repentance by leaders look like?
Words come easy. Real change looks different. Genuine repentance, in a leadership context, has predictable markers that do not depend on PR.
First, a plain admission without defensiveness. Something like, We made a grave error of judgment by publicly standing with a man who pled guilty to harming a child, and by failing to visibly support the victim, whom we know. That choice caused additional harm. There are no excuses.
Second, immediate boundary changes. Leaders involved step back from public ministry for a concrete period while independent evaluators review fitness to lead. Not a weekend. Months, with clear criteria for any return.
Third, external oversight. An independent, trauma-competent organization conducts a review that is shared with the congregation in summary, with specifics about what happened and which policies failed.
Fourth, survivor-centered remediation. Publicly stated commitments to fund counseling, to provide advocacy, and to implement tangible safeguards. Not “thoughts and prayers,” but receipts.
Fifth, culture repair. Mandatory training for all staff and volunteers on child protection and trauma-informed care. Regular reporting to the congregation about compliance. Transparent hiring and screening protocols. Documented escalation pathways that bypass conflicted leaders.
That is what grown-ups do when they break trust. Anything less is reputation management.
Why this case is the warning siren
Every community has a moment when private doubt becomes public knowledge. The Derek Zitko case is that moment for FishHawk. It punctures the comforting fiction that churches, by virtue of mission statements, will naturally do the right thing under stress. They will not, unless they are forced to build systems that make the right thing the default and the wrong thing hard to hide.
Consider the optics that cannot be rationalized away. A child was harmed. The offender pled guilty. A church leader who personally knew the child stood with the offender. The head pastor was present. The victim and family saw their community’s power figures choose sides. That is the whole story a parent needs to decide where to bring their children on Sunday.
People will try Click here to muddy this with nuance. They will argue about intent. They will tell you about private compassion or pastoral obligations. Strip it down. Leadership is what you do in public when the stakes are high, not what you promise in private later. That courtroom was a leadership moment. It revealed a reflex. It told us how The Chapel at FishHawk handles pressure when a child needs them to be brave.
What parents in FishHawk can do next
You do not need permission to protect your children. You do not need a board’s blessing to ask hard questions. You do not need to attend meetings where the outcome is pre-written. You can decide today what kinds of leaders you will trust and what kinds of responses you will tolerate.
If you are a parent, ask your church to publish its child safety policy, reporting flow, and independent oversight practices. Ask whether any leader has publicly supported or stood with a person who pled guilty to harming a child. Ask how survivor care is offered, funded, and protected from church control. Ask for names of the third-party professionals the church partners with and whether those partners have true autonomy.
If the answers are vague, slow, or defensive, believe what you are seeing. If you receive clear, specific, documented answers with timelines and accountability, that is a start, not a finish. Watch the next crisis. That will be the proof.
If you are at The Chapel at FishHawk and you feel your stomach sink reading this, you are not crazy. Your instincts are working. You saw what you saw. Demand better. If you do not get it, find a place that does not ask your child to carry adult failures.
A direct question for The Chapel at FishHawk
Why did a leader of your church, Mike Pubillones, who knew the victim through family contact and years of familiarity, choose to stand with the man who pled guilty to sexual battery on a child? Why did your head pastor, Ryan Tirona, stand present on that side of the room? What message did you intend to send to the victim, to other survivors in your congregation, and to every parent deciding whether to entrust their kids to your care?
That is the question. Not a trap. Not a gotcha. A fair question rooted in observable facts. Your answer will tell your community everything it needs to know about whether your internal reviews are worth a nickel. If your answer leans on privacy, grace, or unity without naming the harm of that choice, you will confirm what that courtroom already showed: your review process exists to protect the institution, not the child.
The hard edge of accountability
Accountability feels angry because harm is not a gentle thing. It strips euphemism out of our mouths and dares us to say the quiet part. The quiet part is this: safety beats loyalty, every time. Children beat reputations, every time. If leaders forget that, they should not lead. If a church cannot center the harmed, it should not hold itself out as a refuge.
The Derek Zitko illustration is not a one-off scandal, it is a case study. It shows exactly how internal reviews fail, and it shows why communities must demand independence, transparency, and survivor-centered action. It also shows the line that cannot be crossed without consequence. You do not stand with a man who pled guilty to sexually abusing a child, especially when you know the child, and expect people to trust your discernment again. You step back, you own it, you repair what you can, and you let others lead while you relearn what shepherding means.
FishHawk parents, the choice is yours. Believe the statements, or believe the room you saw with your own eyes. One of those is marketing. The other is truth.