Sex Offender Closer To Being Declared Sexually Violent Predator
SANTA ANA (CBS) — An Orange County judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to keep a convicted child sex offender in custody and for prosecutors to continue in their effort to have him declared a sexually violent predator.
If a jury rules Lawrence Joseph Brown is too dangerous to be released, he will be declared a sexually violent predator and will be held indefinitely in a mental health institution where psychiatric experts will attempt to rehabilitate him.
Fifty-two-year-old Brown's parole was revoked Dec. 22. Monday's ruling gave jurisdiction over Brown to Orange County authorities, so he will now be held in an area jail while prosecutors seek to prove he is a sexually violent predator who is likely to sexually attack more children if he is free.
In Brown's case, his main mental disorder is pedophilia, Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown said.
Brown had served 25 years of a 49-year sentence for sexually assaulting two girls, aged 7 and 8, in Santa Ana in 1983.
Orange County prosecutors almost lost any chance to seek the petition for Brown when a deputy warden at the California Institution for Men in Chino ordered him released Nov. 17. But when Brown violated parole by letting his girlfriend pick him up from prison, he was taken back into custody and it allowed prosecutors time to seek the sexually violent predator petition.
Brown abducted an 8-year-old girl playing hide-and-seek with her friends near her Santa Ana home on April 19, 1983, and forced her to orally copulate him before raping her.
On Oct. 5 that same year, Brown abducted a 7-year-old girl as she walked to school in Santa Ana. He dragged the youngster, a recent immigrant from Cambodia, into his red van where he raped her and forced her to orally copulate him.
Brown threatened the girl with a knife and drove her to a cemetery and told her she would be buried there if she told anyone.
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