Remarks by District Attorney Tony Rackauckas
Release of Lawrence Brown
November 16, 2010
Thank you for coming. I have with me today Senator Lou Correa, Tustin Police Chief Scott Jordan, and Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters. You’ll have an opportunity to hear from them shortly. Please help me spread the word to everyone in California that a few unelected, unreviewable, anonymous bureaucrats and psychologists have decided that starting November 17, a dangerous, violent sex offender will be a free man to walk the streets of Orange County and prey upon our children.
This case deserves public outrage and we need to work together to change this system that is incomprehensibly endangering our community. I will be discussing who this predator is, how the Department of Mental Health and their so-called mental evaluators are failing every Californian, and what we are doing to fix this broken system.
I’ll warn you in advance that what I’m about to describe is extremely graphic and disturbing, but I can’t afford to sanitize the crimes committed by this predator. Meet Lawrence Brown – the boogie man of every child and their parents’ worst nightmare.
Back in 1985, Brown was convicted of two counts of kidnapping and five counts of forcible child molestation. The jury also found that he kidnapped two little girls for the purpose of molesting them and that he used a deadly weapon and inflicted great bodily injury on his second victim.
On an early spring evening in 1983, Jane Doe #1 was playing hide-and-seek with her friends in the neighborhood. Brown was 24 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall, and weighed over 200 pounds.
This monster pulled the 8-year-old, 57 pound little girl into his red van as she bravely tried to fight him off by kicking and screaming. He threatened to hurt her, forced her to orally copulate him, violently raped her, and drove her some distance before letting her out of the van. He terrified her by reminding her that he would come back and hurt her if she told anyone. The police found semen on her clothing. DNA technology, of course, had not yet been invented.
With the descriptions provided by this brave little girl, police began a massive search for this deviant. There was extensive media coverage at the time. You would think that a person would go into hiding with all of Orange County looking for him. Undeterred, this predator went on the hunt again only five months later. This time, he was even more brutal and more violent.
October 5th, 1983. Brown’s new prey — a 34-pound, 7-year-old Jane Doe #2, an immigrant from Cambodia — was walking to school shortly before 8:00 a.m. Brown forcibly pulled her off the street and put her in his red van while she screamed “Go to school! Go to school!” He later parked his van