Daniel Murphy High School

Citing financial constraints in part caused by its massive settlement with victims of the priest sex-abuse scandal, the Los Angeles Archdiocese is closing Daniel Murphy Catholic High School, a boys academy in the Fairfax District. The school, built in the 1950s on the site of a former seminary, has been losing enrollment for more than a decade, said archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg. He said it was too soon to speculate about what might replace the school at the 2 1/2 -acre site.

Parents of students at Daniel Murphy High School, a Catholic boys academy scheduled to close in June, said Saturday that they would be willing to pay higher tuition, recruit students and raise extra money to keep the Fairfax district campus open. Hundreds of supporters of the school descended on the Los Angeles Archdiocese's downtown Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, demanding that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony reverse the decision to close the campus.

A political corruption scandal took a sordid turn Thursday when a defendant in the Vernon voter-fraud prosecution was charged with sexually molesting four boys while serving as dean of students at Daniel Murphy Catholic High School. John Joseph Malburg, son of Vernon Mayor Leonis Malburg, who is also accused in the corruption case, pleaded not guilty to numerous counts of child sexual abuse, lewd acts and making a videotape for sale of a minor engaged in sex acts.

A months-long delay in notifying parents about sexual abuse allegations at a Catholic high school raised questions Friday about whether the Los Angeles Archdiocese violated its own reform policies in molestation cases. Parents at Daniel Murphy Catholic High School were told Friday that John Joseph Malburg had been accused of abusing three students and another minor over the last decade.

Daniel Murphy High isn't much to look at: a humdrum beige and brown structure on 3rd Street, a few blocks away from the trendy furniture stores and fashion shops that line La Brea Avenue in the Fairfax district. But go inside, to a stack of yearbooks in the small school's administrative office. In the slightly yellowing pages of the 1961 annual, you find the face of a strong-jawed young man with a focused gaze: Bernard C. Parks, now Los Angeles' police chief.

If tycoon Daniel Murphy is recalled at all, it is for his single namesake, a highly regarded high school for Catholic boys in the Mid-Wilshire district. But in his day, the railroad-oilman was the city's richest and most powerful man, the creator of company towns in Needles, Calif., Colton and El Segundo.