Camnong Boa-Ubol — Wat Dhammaram, Stickney, Illinois
A Buddhist monk at Wat Dhammaram who pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual assault and was sentenced in 2013 to 15 years. A separate 2000 allegation at the same temple was answered with a letter promising he would fly back to Thailand; a Tribune investigation found him serving at a California temple instead.
Buddhist (Thai Theravada) Pleaded guilty
- Person
- Camnong Boa-Ubol
- Role
- Buddhist monk
- Institution
- Wat Dhammaram, Stickney, Illinois; later Wat Buddhavipassana, Long Beach, California
- Location
- Cook County, Illinois
- Status
- Pleaded guilty (September 27, 2013)
- Sentence
- 15 years in prison
Case in brief
Tier 1 · Court-proven — as the Cook County State's Attorney states the case
Camnong Boa-Ubol was a monk at Wat Dhammaram, a Thai Buddhist temple in Stickney, outside Chicago. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s account — the account attached to his guilty plea — is that the assaults began in 1998, when the victim was 13: he had asked her to do paid work outside the temple, later invited her into a trailer on the temple grounds, and assaulted her there, on numerous occasions over approximately two years, after threatening to harm her and her family. She became pregnant in 1999 and gave birth in early 2000. A paternity test confirmed Boa-Ubol was the father. He was charged in 2012 — arrested that May in Anchorage, Alaska, where, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said at the time, he was working as a dishwasher — and on September 27, 2013, he pleaded guilty to one count of Aggravated Criminal Sexual Assault and was sentenced by Judge Colleen Hyland to 15 years in prison. The victim is not named in this file.
The record
Tier 1 · Court-proven
| Item | Record |
|---|---|
| Charged | 2012 (arrested May 2012, Anchorage; returned to Cook County that July) |
| Guilty plea | September 27, 2013 — one count of Aggravated Criminal Sexual Assault (the State’s Attorney’s release reports plea and sentence together; no separate plea date is stated, and none is invented here) |
| Sentence | 15 years (Hyland, J., Bridgeview) |
Status
Sentenced to 15 years in September 2013. This file states the sentence; it does not track his present custody beyond it.
Attributed allegations — not court findings
Tier 2 · Attributed allegations
A second, separate allegation — a different girl — is documented by a Chicago Tribune investigation (Megan Twohey, July 2011), sourced to a civil lawsuit and on-the-record interviews. It was never, on the sources found, a criminal charge, and it must not be merged with the plea case above. As the Tribune reported it: in 2000, a 12-year-old told three monks at Wat Dhammaram that a monk had turned off the lights during a tutoring session and kissed and fondled her. Monk P. Boonshoo Sriburin wrote to her family that the ‘wrong doer had accepted what he had done’ and would within days ’leave the temple permanently’ by flying back to Thailand: ‘We have done our best to restore the order.’ Eleven years later the Tribune found Boa-Ubol serving at Wat Buddhavipassana in Long Beach, California, where he told the paper he interacted with children. Sriburin acknowledged to the Tribune that ‘restoring order’ did not involve warning the California temple — and that Wat Dhammaram did not even tell its own board of directors: ‘We have no authority to do anything… He has his own choice to live anywhere.’ A claim in some summaries that he ‘served at a temple in Alaska’ is not supported by any source found: the verified Alaska fact is the arrest, and the dishwasher job.
Records requested & responses
This archive has not filed records requests in this case. The file rests on the published sources below and will be updated if court or institutional records are obtained, or if that changes.
Sources
- Cook County State’s Attorney (Anita Alvarez), sentencing release — plea to one count of Aggravated Criminal Sexual Assault; 15 years; the 1998 onset, the trailer, the threats, the pregnancy and the paternity test, reproduced in full: copylinemagazine.com
- WLS / ABC7 (September 30, 2013) — the State’s Attorney’s and Sheriff’s statements, including the Anchorage arrest and dishwasher work, archived at BishopAccountability.org: bishop-accountability.org
- Chicago Tribune, Megan Twohey (July 2011), ‘Buddhist monks walk away from sex-abuse cases’ — the 2000 allegation, the Sriburin letter, the California temple, and the ’no authority’ admission, archived in full: bishop-accountability.org
Filed October 25, 2026, from the published sources below. Minor victims are never named or identified in this file.