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A Story I Didn’t Write and Why I Didn’t Write It

“I’m calling because I’m desperate,” she said. “I know you write stories like this.”

The caller explained herself.

“I have a woman friend in Brooktrails,” she began. “She has a brand-new baby and has become homeless trying to get bail up for the father of her baby. He’s a Native American who is accused by a little girl that he’s never even talked to of child molestation. The parents of this little girl went and got a list of newly released felons from the Sheriff’s Department, and they came up with this young man.”

The caller said that the child who'd made the false accusations against the Native American was “known to lie all around the neighborhood.” She said the child's story about the alleged molest contained “big flaws,” and that the child is nutty because she “has been in counseling.” The caller also said that the “prosecuting attorney” didn't like Indians. She said that the accused child molester, an innocent man and now a young father, has had “some problems” inspired by alcohol.

“He’s from Point Arena,” the caller said, as if geography half-accounted for the man's plight. “His mother went to prison for child neglect. He had a tough time growing up. He was trying to change his life when my friend met him when she was his counselor. Now she has his baby. She’s 39. He's 20.”

I'd logged 10 improbabilities but went on listening.

“He went with her to the hospital to deliver the baby on February 15th. Four hours later, he had a hearing on this molest charge. He walked to court from the hospital after the baby was born, like he was supposed to, and they slammed him back in jail.”

The accused molester's bail had originally been set at $10,000. His 39-year-old lover had posted bond for him. This time, at his arraignment the day his son was born, judge Eric Labowitz set bail at $75,000.

The caller complained: “My friend can't make the new bail. I don't know why he was re-arrested. I guess it's because this girl who makes up stories said he rattled the catfood dish. And they’re calling it kidnapping. He never did anything. He didn’t even talk to the girl. The girl was always wandering around the neighborhood unsupervised.”

“Bail of $75,000 is pretty steep for rattling a catfood dish,” I said.

She didn't hear me. The implausibilities continued to pile up.

The caller said the accused had no history of child molestation. She said when he was 18, he had a 16-year-old girlfriend whose parents were unhappy with that relationship, but that was their problem, not Romeo and Juliet's. Sure, the parents made noises about statutory rape and other complaints about their daughter's love interest, but parents tend to be critical of their children's emotional entanglements, don't they?

Bum-rapped by the parents of the 16-year-old, a few months later the unfortunate young man encountered “The Bad Seed,” a malicious 9-year-old who has succeeded in putting him in jail. There the innocent young man languishes, falsely accused, condemned on racial grounds alone.

“A known rapist,” the caller said, is a frequent visitor to the child's home. The caller said that the woman who gave her the information about the unsavory persons the criminally imaginative youngster is spending her formative years with “is someone we trust 100 percent. We know the girl was left to wander around the neighborhood all the time and that she lies; none of the neighborhood children will play with her, because she makes up stories and she’s strange.”

The neighbors, she said, won't appear in court to describe the alleged victim's unreliability because “they’re afraid of retribution” and “will only say these things anonymously. A lot of people just want to keep their mouths shut about things like this.”

She said that the Sheriff’s Department report on the matter — and the suspect himself — was contrived with the help of a relative of the victim's mother who works for the Sheriff's Department.

“I believe that the mother of this girl,” the caller said, “got her relative to go through the Sheriff's Department's computer, and they came up with his name from the list of newly released felons. And then they decided to charge him, just because he lives on her street in Brooktrails. One time this kid even let herself into my friend's house when she was taking a shower. She came out of the shower and the girl was in her house just sitting there!”

The caller continued her indictment of the innocent man's 9-year-old accuser.

“The girl was in counseling at the school, and the Public Defender’s investigator hasn’t even tried to interview the teacher or the counselor. If anyone’s suggesting things to this girl, it’s probably the girl’s mother. I have some names. The girl says in her testimony that she told her teacher at Blosser Lane, Mr. Hughes, about being molested. They haven’t spoken to Mr. Hughes. And they haven't spoken to the counselor. I have a call in to the prosecutor, but I haven’t heard back yet.”

The suspect is a young man named Christopher Ray Poe. Poe is 20. Captain Kevin Broin of the Sheriff's Department, a man with a gift for wry understatement, looked up Poe's criminal history.

“He's known to us,” Broin said, planting his tongue in his cheek. “And he had a long record as a juvenile. We've had 61 contacts with Mr. Poe since his 18th birthday. I believe that’s a record for a person his age.”

The charges against the adult Poe include accusations of lewd acts with children, rapes, dope, burglaries, missed court appearances, gang associations, and obscene phone calls.

“Pretty much the whole penal code, it looks like,” Captain Broin laconically concluded.

The child who says that Poe violated her lived on the same Brooktrails street as Poe and Poe's alcohol counselor at the time of the alleged attack on her. Brooktrails is a suburban-like housing tract arrayed on several thousand acres west of Willits. It tends not to be as benign as it appears.

Young Mr. Poe's mistress is 20 years his senior. He met her while he was enrolled in the substance abuse program at Ukiah's Ford Street. She was his counselor, and now she's the mother of his child. “Mrs. Poe” has since departed Ford Street, apparently because her employers disapproved of her relationship with the troubled young man. Ford Street's therapeutic regimen ordinarily doesn't seem to include staff-client reproduction. At the time of the Ford Street romance, Poe was on probation for having sexually imposed himself on three different young women. While assigned to Ford Street, Poe, drunk, attempted to force himself on at least two more women.

But, in one of those Only-In-Mendocino County decisions by The People In Charge, it was decided that 20-year-old Mr. Poe's rehabilitation would have the best chance of success if he went to live with his 39-year-old alcohol counselor in her home in Brooktrails. The Public Defender thought it was a good idea, the former Ford Street drug and alcohol counselor thought it was a good idea. Poe thought it was an absolutely swell idea, most crucially, Judge Henry Nelson thought it was a good idea, and his approval is the only one that really counts.

20-year-old Mr. Poe went to live in the drug and alcohol-free Brooktrails home of his 39-year-old helping professional. Not long afterwards.....

The little girl says she was walking home from school one day when Poe invited her into his house to look at some kittens. She was 9 at the time. Poe said he was 12. The child, glancing at her youthful-looking and not tall neighbor, walked into the house. She says Mr. Poe was nude and that he proceeded to violate her. He told her he would kill her if she said anything about what he'd done to her. As soon as she had a chance that dismal afternoon, she ran. She said later she thought she was going to die.

And it took her awhile to say anything at all about the terrible thing that had happened to her. She lived just down the street from Mr. Poe and every time she saw him, which was often, he gave her the “I'll kill you” look. She was still 9 years old.

But when she finally told her mom, mom went straight for the police. There was no denying the truth of what the child had said about her encounter with Mr. Poe. Her account has not varied in either large or small detail.

Poe was arrested and charged with kidnapping and sex with a minor, and penetration with a foreign object. It's not as if the guy hadn't looked at sex charges before.

His victim, according to court records, is not unsupervised. She comes from a stable home. She's smart and articulate and, for a kid who has suffered what she has suffered, emotionally strong. She was able to describe her experience with Mr. Poe to judge Labowitz in such convincing detail the judge more than doubled Poe's bail and ordered him bound over for trial.

A person who knows Poe and fears him assesses him this way: “He’s not particularly tall, but he’s fairly well-developed and, well, odd-looking. He’s got kind of strange eyes. He’s not unattractive as a person, but mentally he doesn't connect all the dots. There might be some brain damage there, but at the same time, he's very cunning. He manipulated this little girl into a physical situation where she wasn’t free to leave. She escaped the minute she saw an opening, but he's done this kind of thing on several previous occasions. He traps women in their homes or in their cars. I definitely think Mr. Poe is getting worse.”

That assessment is unanimously shared by local law enforcement.

The day his son was born to his Brooktrails drug and alcohol counselor was also the day judge Labowitz kicked Poe's bail up from $30,000 to $75,000. As Poe sat in court waiting for his case to be called, he laughed and joked with the court people. He was unconcerned. He'd been in court many times before without suffering more than a brief time out at the Low Gap Jail and this day was just one more guest appearance. Poe acted like a guy waiting to go the Letterman Show. He didn't seem to understand that he was in serious trouble on charges that could put him away for the rest of his life. But when Labowitz raised his bail and ordered him into custody for rape of a child, Poe stopped laughing and started yelling that he was being accused of a crime he hadn't committed.

Since Poe's arrest two weeks ago, the 39-year-old mother of his child and a woman friend of hers are tag team calling the local media to help them. If, they say, the media would only tell Poe's true story, he'd be free again to be a father to his child, a husband to his counselor. The women who love Poe portray him as another wronged person from an historically wronged race — wronged this time by a devious child's criminal imagination.

Poe is being held in the County Jail's “A” unit, where the men accused of sex crimes are housed out of reach of other inmates. Jails can be dangerous places for people charged with crimes against children. Poe, according to the Sheriff's Department, “has not been a management problem while in custody.”

Meanwhile, the 39-year-old mother of Poe's infant son and her teenage son from a previous marriage have been evicted from their Brooktrails home. The former Ford Street counselor and her two sons are living in her car.

I couldn't find much to write about that might help Mr. Poe. I hope someone is helping his common-law wife and her two boys find a place to live. I hope the child Poe raped won't be permanently harmed by his having stolen her childhood from her just because he wanted to satisfy a moment's psychotic impulse. Young Mr. Poe has done a lot of serious harm; he has taken down one foolish woman and three young people all at once. I don't envy the lawyer who's somehow got to defend this man.

The terrible matter of The People and Mr. Poe is set for jury trial, Monday, April 30th.

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