Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Father Lascivious

by Mark Scaramella

DAN GARCIA, former Superior Court Clerk, former Redwood Valley Christian church minister, was sentenced to three years in state prison last Thursday afternoon after pleading guilty to one charge of "lewd acts on a minor." Two other felony counts of oral copulation with said minor, and sexual penetration of said minor were dismissed. The judge, a visiting retired judge named Vonasek (all the local judges having run for cover as soon as charges were filed), was allowed to consider the other conduct at sentencing under what is known as a Harvey Waiver. Mr. Garcia admitted that he sexually molested the victim many times for more than two years, beginning when the victim was 13 or 14 years old while the victim lived in Mr. Garcia's pious home. The three year sentence was the maximum allowed under California law for this trimmed down guilty plea. Upon release — probably within 18 months because that's how perv sentences go these days — Mr. Garcia will be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, thus joining Mendocino County's army of unsupervised sex offenders.

AN EVEN more serious charge of felony continuous sexual abuse had been dropped earlier when DA Norm Vroman and the court accepted Garcia's guilty plea to the lewd and lascivious charge.

AT FIRST, Garcia was released on his own recognizance after he plead guilty to the first abuse charge, on condition that he have "no contact" with the victim. Garcia immediately tried to sneak a note to the girl by writing it on a piece of paper he had cleverly trimmed to the size of a compact disk, tucking the note under an ordinary music CD which he asked a friend to give to his daughter. Garcia's note was discovered, however, and Garcia was put in jail, thus appearing in court last week in white jail coveralls, looking more like the perp/perv he has shown himself to be.

THE SCENE in the courtroom last Thursday was highly emotional. The victim, Garcia's adopted daughter, neatly adding incest once-removed to Garcia's sins, broke down into sobs whenever prison for Garcia was mentioned by the judge or the prosecutor. It was necessary for the prosecution to note publicly that the victim was Garcia's adopted daughter because that fact made his conduct much worse and therefore an unavoidable consideration in sentencing. In her letter to the judge, the victim said she didn't want her "father" to go to prison, she just wanted Garcia to stop molesting her so she could continue to live a somewhat normal homelife. After prosecutor Keith Faulder explained why Garcia's behavior was so egregious, he then announced that the victim wanted to make a statement to the court. After the courtroom was cleared the girl begged the judge not to sentence her "father" to prison.

GARCIA, who has been married to his wife for 24 years, adopted the victim out of a foster home where she had been previously sexually abused. The girl was 13 at the time Garcia adopted her. Within a matter of months Garcia was taking advantage of her, typically in a bathroom of his home when the rest of the family was out of the house. The prosecution and Sonoma County's probation department (who prepared the court report because Mendo's Probation Department ducked the case) told the judge that since Garcia knew the victim had been abused before her adoption, his conduct was that much more egregious and he should get the maximum sentence. Exactly.

GARCIA'S abuse was finally exposed when the victim told her adoptive mother about it, who called CPS, who called the Willits police, who had the victim place a pretext call to Garcia during which Garcia was recorded. Garcia is heard trying to get the victim to lie and say that her allegations are not true. When the victim wouldn't agree to let the oleaginous court clerk off the hook, Garcia threatened to kill himself. Following his faux suicide threat (which would have been the honorable thing to do), Garcia tried to coerce the victim with descriptions of how his family would be ruined. As prosecutor Keith Faulder argued, Garcia was trying to re-victimize the victim by making her feel as if it was her fault he was going to be punished. The victim told investigators that she hadn't reported the molestations earlier because she knew that her father and the authorities (Hello, CPS, Mendocino County's tax-subsidized child non-advocates) would say that she was "unstable." Garcia had put so much pressure on the victim that she did indeed try to kill herself the day before the creep was finally arrested on December 14, 2004.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY Jan Cole-Wilson said there was no excuse for her client's behavior, but said that sending him to prison would only further punish the victim since sending him to prison would break up the family. We will note here that Cole-Wilson is a feminist and a liberal. Cole-Wilson suggested that Garcia be placed in an intensive treatment program in Sonoma County for molesters where the family, such as it was, would have a chance at being rebuilt. Or re-molested.

IN AN ONLY-IN-MENDO MOMENT, Judge Vonasek, who had had weeks to prepare for Garcia's sentencing and declared that he was going to follow the three-years-in-prison recommendation of the Sonoma County Probation Department at the outset, asked Prosector Faulder whether therapy was available in prison. Apparently, Judge Vonasek didn't know whether therapy was available in the state prison system. (Faulder said it depended on the evaluation at San Quentin, the state prison system's sorting station, but that the judge could recommend therapy if he so chose, although the Department of Corrections didn't have to follow it.)

GARCIA, for his part, appropriately seemed like a defeated man. He is. He defeated himself and destroyed his family as he wrought his own destruction. He stood up and told the court he was ashamed of himself, and apologized to the community, his friends, family and the victim. And finally declared that his punishment was his fault, not hers.

ONE OF THE reasons Garcia's molestation went on for so long was that Garcia was able to convince our perennially credulous local authorities and various local "helping professionals," that the victim was "crazy" and therefore the signs that something was wrong in the Garcia household were dismissed as coming from a disturbed young girl. Apparently the authorities were aware that the victim had run away from home on at least several occasions and that she had been mutilating herself, yet they didn't look into it, even though the victim, at least judging by her well-written and articulate statement to the court and her lack of other documented problems, had no other objective signs of being crazy. Mental Health, Child Protective Services and the Willits Police all assumed that the victim's repeated running away was her problem, not the family's. If there's any lesson in this tragedy, it's that these authorities should pay closer attention to kids who are having trouble rather than simply assuming it's the kid. As with any kind of possible abuse situation, other, independent corroborating factors need to be checked. Whether it's the quick administration of Ritalin or the dismissal of the kid's problems as self-induced, a few additional inquiries and checks in these kinds of cases can put potential violators on notice. Bottom line? The children of the poor have nobody looking out for them. Nobody.