A Child’s Nightmare: Molested and Maybe Infected With HIV : Crime: ‘Uncle Adam’ awaits trial on 26 counts of attempted murder and sex abuse involving neighborhood youngsters.

They cry too often and fear too much, these children who knew Adam Brown.

An 8-year-old boy asks his parents if he’s going to die of AIDS. They tell him no, but they’re not sure.

A 7-year-old girl sobs for hours at a stretch, and her little brother, 5, won’t go to the bathroom alone. “Bad things happened in the bathroom,” he tells his mother.

A 3-year-old girl who once leaped into visitors’ laps now runs when strangers call.

It would be sad enough if all that these children had lost was their innocence. But there is more.

The man that kids called “Uncle Adam” is now in jail, awaiting trial on 26 counts of attempted murder and sexual abuse of neighborhood children. Adam Brown carries the deadly AIDS virus, and he is accused of trying to infect the children by forcing sex upon them.

Boys and girls told police that Brown abused them repeatedly at his Roseburg house between May and September. One 5-year-old boy said Brown smeared semen into a scratch on the boy’s arm.

Children said Brown told them not to tell and threatened them with knives, scissors and matches. One child said Brown once burned a Bible, warning that Satan would come if they didn’t do what he wanted.

Now, as the children battle nightmares and their parents nervously await results of AIDS tests, residents of this little timber town in the mountains of southern Oregon search for answers to a plaguing question: How could anyone do such things to innocent children?

The curious packed the courtroom at Brown’s Nov. 19 arraignment. But if they expected a monster, Brown did not look the part. He was more the guy next door--30 years old, a good-looking man with blond hair and a trim beard.

Children liked him. Parents trusted him. He was a lay preacher at his church.

Few suspected the dark side of Adam Brown, said his estranged wife, Nancy Brown. “God was always in the picture,” she said. “But he thought Satan would deliver the boys.”

It was in church, as a teen-ager, that Nancy first met Adam Brown. He was a normal boy from a religious family, she said. He joined the U.S. Marines after graduating from Roseburg High School, and they married two years later, in 1982.

The Marines taught Brown computer technology, and he rose through the ranks to staff sergeant. He was a devoted father to their two children, Nancy Brown said.

But Adam Brown had a secret, and four years ago, while stationed in Southern California, he finally told his wife: He was gay. He always had been, he told her, but his conservative Christian upbringing had taught him that homosexuality was a sin.

Coming out of the closet did not resolve Brown’s conflict, his wife said.

He sought and received an honorable discharge from the Marines three years ago, then started cruising gay bars in Southern California, she said. Six months later, she said, he tested positive for HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

Depressed and angry, Brown stayed close to home for two months, then resumed his sexual adventures. After using up a box of condoms supplied by health officials, he used no protection. It was his revenge, Nancy said: “He said, ‘They gave it to me. I’m going to give it back to them.’ ”

They never divorced. Nancy said she and the children moved out several times, but always came back out of economic necessity.

They joined Brown in June, 1991, after he’d moved back to Roseburg. Brown worked as a secretary at the local community college, which meant Nancy could get free tuition.

They rented a house at the edge of town, on the corner of a busy highway and a quiet, dead-end road. The houses were small, but the yards were big--a good neighborhood for kids.

Life with Adam Brown “just got crazier and crazier,” his wife said. He had a live-in boyfriend for a while, she said. Sometimes, he’d get drunk and strut around naked, saying he lusted after little boys, she said. Once, she said, he sliced his chest with a knife and proclaimed, “Look--I cut myself here, I gave my soul to the devil.”

Then he’d sober up and apologize for misbehaving. “He’d stop doing it for a short period of time,” she said. “Then he’d start up again.”

Last January, Nancy Brown left for the last time, taking the children to California and moving in with her parents.

In May, a new family moved into Adam Brown’s neighborhood.

The woman of the family had known Brown since childhood. She and her husband knew he had the AIDS virus and decided to help him once symptoms of the disease started accelerating.

Brown took a shine to their 8-year-old boy. He played football with the boy and regaled him with stories of military life. He’d invite him over to play computer games at his house.

By then, Brown was going to church again. He sang and played piano at Fair Oaks Community Church, where his mother is the minister. He became a lay preacher, pounding the pulpit on Sunday evenings with spirited sermons about letting the blood of Jesus wash away your sins.

On the phone, he told Nancy Brown he’d joined an AIDS support group and was seeing a psychiatrist. But then he’d call her again later, and he’d be drunk and abusive.

“He put on shows for everything,” Nancy Brown said. “Work was one show, church was another. He fooled everybody. He’d preach on Sunday, then get drunk on Monday through Saturday.”

The show stopped Oct. 1, when the 8-year-old boy told his mother that Brown had molested him at his house. The boy told police that, during the summer, Brown had repeatedly shown him pornographic movies, given him vodka and drugs, and had oral and anal sex with him.

Brown was arrested Oct. 6 and charged with first-degree sodomy and first-degree sexual abuse of the boy.

Reports of abuse involving at least eight other children soon surfaced, and a blood test confirmed Brown’s HIV status. On Nov. 13, a grand jury issued a wide-ranging indictment: five counts of attempted murder, nine counts of sodomy, four counts of rape, five counts of reckless endangering, and three counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object.

Since the indictment, other families have told authorities that Brown may have abused their children.

In late November, police arrested a 27-year-old woman, accusing her of joining Brown in sex with some children. Authorities say Tonja Sue Nugent, who worked temporarily at a nearby day-care center, took children in her care to Brown’s home in May. Her attorney said Nugent denies the charges.

The case has sent a shiver of horror through Roseburg, a conservative town of loggers and millworkers. Sexual abuse of children is as common here as anywhere, but AIDS is supposed to be a big-city problem.

Local mental health counselors have tried to head off a backlash against gays or people with AIDS. They say that if Brown fits the profile of a typical sex predator, it is not because he is gay, but because he is married and has children. The vast majority of sexual predators are heterosexual.

Talk on the streets, meanwhile, vacillates between shudders of disgust and sputters of rage.

A speech class at Umpqua Community College discussed the issue, and the consensus was that Brown “ought to be shot in the head,” said student Ralph Snyder. The charge that Brown smeared semen into a boy’s scratch--”that right there gets people in a frenzy,” Snyder said.

The families of Brown’s alleged victims are the most frenzied of all.

None of the children has tested positive for AIDS. But not all the test results are back, and a negative result this early is not conclusive. It can take six months or more after infection for HIV antibodies to build up in the system.

And so the families wait.

The night before Brown’s arraignment, the 8-year-old boy’s parents sat in their living room and unleashed their fury toward the man they once considered a friend. Brown is accused of molesting their two daughters, as well.

“I detest him,” the mother said. “When I found out, I wanted to rip his head off and spit down his neck. I’d like to see him get the death penalty.”

Her husband said he felt a boiling deep inside, “like I swallowed a piece of burning sulfur.” He said he wanted to see Brown hunted down like an animal and killed.

For several minutes they railed against Brown, until their wrath subsided and a familiar numbness settled in. The woman stared blankly out the window at the front yard, where a cold November rain was stripping the last leaves from the trees.

Maybe they should move, she mused, but said she had no idea where. She said she dreams of a town where her children would be safe from all the evils of this world. But she knows such a place does not exist.

Her husband dreams of hauling his family into the mountains and never coming out. But he knows it will not happen.

Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, the family will wake up on this dead-end street at the edge of town. If they want to go anywhere, they’ll have to pass Adam Brown’s old house on the way.

There will be more AIDS tests for the children, more counseling. Brown has yet to enter a plea--his next court appearance is Dec. 18--and if the case goes to trial, there will be more trauma as the children are called to testify.

It’s going to be a long, dark winter.

“It’s still hitting me,” the woman said. “Every day I feel something different. I feel like I’ve been totally betrayed. He destroyed our family’s life and we have to rebuild it . . . and I don’t know where to start.”