All of them agreed that what he did was a betrayal of public trust.
“He should make a public apology. What he did was abuse of power. He broke the trust of the people. He’s supposed to set a good example but he broke the law,” a student told the Variety.
“Why is it that officials always get away with things while ordinary people, even for the smallest mistakes, are punished, even for picking a flower?” another student said.
“It’s horrible,” another student said.
According to documents submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, on the early hours of Jan. 8, 2010, four officers of the Department of Corrections, including Commissioner Dolores M. Aldan, “escorted” Qingmei Cheng, a federal detainee, out of the local jail and brought her to the governor’s residence to give him a massage.
Cheng was taken out of jail without prior permission from the U.S. Marshals Service or the federal court.
The detainee was being held without bail after being charged with 22 counts of attempting to bring aliens to the U.S.
The governor has claimed: “I never ordered my massage therapist to be brought to my house.”
The NMC students interviewed by the Variety are not “buying” Fitial’s explanation.
“This makes me mad. He’s the governor. He’s supposed to know better than us. But I still respect him because he’s our governor,” a student said.
Another student said she’s disappointed with how the governor is abusing the people’s trust.
“He should be a role model to us. Why did he do this?” she asked.
Another student said it’s bad enough that the CNMI’s former lt. governor, Timothy P. Villagomez, is already serving seven years in a federal jail for corruption.
He said elected leaders should be very careful of their actions and truthfully serve the public as they had promised.
“I think what he did was wrong,” he said, referring to the governor.
The federal court scheduled an evidentiary hearing on the masseuse scandal for Feb. 17.
The NMC students interviewed were also curious why the four Corrections officers who escorted Cheng weren’t relieved of their duties pending an investigation.
