photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Mark Gridley appears at his competency hearing Thursday, May 8, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

A Douglas County judge on Monday delayed a decision on whether to lower the $1.5 million bond of a speech pathologist accused of molesting multiple children last winter at a Lawrence elementary school.

After a hearing Monday afternoon, Judge Amy Hanley said she will take the new bond request under advisement and likely issue an order on Aug. 4.

The defendant, 61-year-old Mark Gridley, has been in custody since Feb. 8, when he was accused of a sex crime against a Prairie Park Elementary student. Earlier this month, as expected, those charges were upgraded to include six more children, for a total of 14 charges: seven counts of aggravated indecent liberties with a child and seven counts of kidnapping.

Gridley’s attorney, Vanessa Riebli, argued in her motion to modify bond to $100,000 cash/surety that Gridley was unable to post a bond of $1.5 million and that the addition of the new charges had caused him to have to wait until October for his preliminary hearing, at which the court will decide if there is probable cause to order him to trial. The preliminary hearing was set for July 29, until the state added the new charges three weeks ago.

In her motion to modify, Riebli noted that the purpose of bond is simply to assure the defendant’s appearance in court and public safety.

Riebli cited Gridley’s substantial family ties to the Lawrence area, where she said he has lived for the past 17 years. She said in her motion that he resided with his wife and two children, but she did not mention that the wife had recently filed for divorce.

Riebli said that Gridley has no prior criminal history and therefore no failures to appear in court. A bond condition of electronic monitoring with home confinement would “assure public safety,” she said in the motion, noting that “his whereabouts will be known at all times.”

Additionally, she said the court could impose a condition that he have “no contact with children under the age of 16 years old except for family members.”

In the amended complaint, which the state had said it expected to file, the initials of seven children are listed as victims, ranging in age from 6 or 7 to 10 or 11. The complaint provides only birth years, not months. All of the charges are listed as having occurred on Feb. 6 or Feb. 7 of this year.

Gridley, who was recently deemed competent to stand trial, is accused of having abused the young students under the guise of a speech therapy “test” while they were blindfolded and their hands were tied, as the Journal-World has reported.

Gridley’s preliminary hearing will now take place over three days in the fall: Oct. 2,3 and 6.

This is a developng story and will be updated.