OREGON
The Oregonian
Monday, August 29, 2005
STEVE WOODWARD
A week before he died, Larry Lynn Craven called his lawyer, as he often did, to say that he could no longer live with the demons of his childhood sexual abuse.
"He had called me, crying and depressed and saying that he wanted to commit suicide," Daniel J. Gatti recalls. "I kept saying, 'God will get us through this.' "
A week later, on July 21, the Brooks man was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, making him the third clergy sex-abuse plaintiff to commit suicide or apparent suicide in the past nine months.
The deaths are a disturbing undercurrent in the crucial mediations now under way between 66 sex-abuse plaintiffs and the Archdiocese of Portland, and they have prompted Gatti to ask a federal judge for help in preventing more suicides.
"Over the past several months," Gatti wrote in an affidavit filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Portland, "I have fielded several calls from clients who, with a drink in one hand and a gun in the other, have threatened to commit suicide, and, but for divine intervention and a great deal of talk, I believe that they would have, in fact, committed suicide."
The mediations have stirred up dormant emotions that are rooted in abuse that plaintiffs say took place decades ago.