'I'M HEALING AT LAST'

At Age 14, She Was Sexually Abused by Her Teacher

- NICOLE ACOSTA

It was a Friday afternoon during the fall semester of 2002 when Stephanie Langlitz, then a 14-year-old high school freshman in Oro Valley, Ariz., heard a man call out to her in a noisy school hallway: “7 p.m!” Langlitz—who was being treated for depression—had recently moved from upstate New York and was struggling to fit in. So when her sympathetic Spanish teacher Mr. Lindrud asked her to meet him at a park that evening, she agreed. “I thought he was my friend,” she says.

Friendship wasn’t the intention. At the crowded park, Mark Lindrud, then 30, lifted Langlitz in his arms, carried her to a bench and thrust his hand down her shorts. She was too shocked to react. “I went home and just had no words,” says Langlitz, now 36. “I couldn’t believe he had done that.”