CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Times
Molestation allegations against Lawrence Sandstrom go back to the 1960s. His file will be among those released this summer by a host of independent Catholic orders.
By Victoria Kim and Harriet Ryan
July 6, 2013
The preschooler’s hair was falling out in clumps. He had stopped playing with other children and barely spoke to his teachers. He woke screaming each night, and during the day clung to his mother.
What’s wrong, she asked again and again. Finally, he told her: His big brother, adopted seven years earlier from the Maryvale Catholic orphanage in Rosemead, was molesting him. Devastated, she rushed the older boy to a therapist’s office, where he offered a harrowing explanation.
“He said that Brother Larry had done it to him at Maryvale — him and other children,” his mother recalled years later.
The man he named was Lawrence Sandstrom, a brother of the Holy Cross religious order and the subject of molestation allegations in Los Angeles stretching back to the 1960s. Over the years, claims against Sandstrom have cost the Catholic Church more than $3 million in civil settlements. But unlike in the L.A. Archdiocese, which released 12,000 pages of internal records on abusive priests in January, there has yet to be a full accounting of the church’s handling of Sandstrom.
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