E-Mail This Article to a Friend IN MEMORIAM Patrick McSorley, 1974–2004 BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

I first heard about the tragic death of Patrick McSorley, a victim of the late pedophile priest John Geoghan, last Monday at noon. My husband, a photographer who had taken pictures of McSorley for a March 2001 Phoenix article on the Boston archdiocese’s reckless history of dealing with Geoghan, called me at work and told me that McSorley had been found dead. According to published reports, the 29-year-old Dorchester resident died early on the morning of February 23 at a North End apartment, apparently as the result of a drug overdose. Summing up reaction to the news, my husband said, "It’s so heartbreaking."

Indeed. Of all the victims of clergy sexual abuse who have emerged from the shadows and identified themselves in recent years, McSorley has stood out in my mind. After I first interviewed him in February 2001, he became something of a spokesperson for the 84 Geoghan victims whose lawsuits against Bernard Cardinal Law and others touched off the priest-abuse scandal still roiling the Boston archdiocese. McSorley must have appeared before the media hundreds of times to talk about the pain and shame of clergy sexual abuse. Yet every time I saw him, I was reminded of the man I first met, a man who offered up a warm yet sad smile. A man who hesitated when he held out his hand, as if unsure of the world. A man who couldn’t sit still for more than 10 minutes without pulling at his pants, wringing his hands, and running his fingers through his cropped black hair.

"I’m very awkward socially," McSorley said at the time. "Sometimes, I break out in a sweat meeting people. I feel all nervous. I feel very out of place."

During that initial interview, I got the sense that this young man (he was just 26) had lived such a troubled and tragic life that his experience with Geoghan had pushed him over the edge. McSorley told me wrenching details of his abuse — how his family priest had taken him out for ice cream when he was 12, how the priest had caressed his knee before moving up to his genital area. "I just froze," he recalled. Geoghan "was grabbing at me. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even eat my ice cream.... It was like everything was lost. My mind just went blank." Worse still, McSorley told me, Geoghan had assaulted him not long after his father had committed suicide. "He came by to give condolences" is how he put it.

When I spoke with him six months later — in August 2001, after Cardinal Law admitted in court records that he had received a 1984 letter warning him about Geoghan’s pedophilia — McSorley seemed driven to expose Law and the archdiocese’s sordid history of covering up child molestation. "I’m angry," he admitted. He was angry that the cardinal hadn’t done something to stop the abuse in 1984 — two years before his own run-in with Geoghan. "You’d think being a cardinal he’d have been sympathetic to the victims," McSorley said. "It just adds insult to injury."

By the time Geoghan appeared before a judge, in January 2002, the priest-abuse scandal had blown wide open in Boston. McSorley attended the Middlesex County trial, along with Mark Keane and Anthony Muzzi Jr., who had also been victimized by Geoghan. On the first day, the three stood side by side in the back of the courtroom, just watching the former priest. They never took their eyes off Geoghan — until, that is, Judge Sandra Hamlin warned against "attempts to intimidate." McSorley and the others were then escorted out of the courtroom. But, I thought, who could blame them for staring down the man who had stolen their childhoods?

Later that year, in September, McSorley and the 83 other plaintiffs finally received some measure of justice when the Boston archdiocese offered them a combined $10 million settlement. At the time, McSorley appeared at a press conference and told reporters: "The money is not going to change my life. My heart is always going to be broken. I mean, these are people my family once loved."

As far as I can tell, that was McSorley’s last turn in the media spotlight. Last summer, the public glimpsed just how tortured he was when he was found floating, unconscious, in the Neponset River in Dorchester. Though McSorley denied that he had tried to commit suicide, the prospect would not have surprised me. As he explained to me in our very first interview: "Since I went public, I feel like I got a little weight off my shoulders. But just a little."