How Could You? Hall of Shame-Pastor Tommy Gene Daniels UPDATED

“Tommy Daniels has pleaded not guilty to six counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child. He is being held on $6 million bail.”

Update: “The wife of the Rio Linda pastor accused of child molestation told a Sacramento Superior Court jury today that she believes her husband is innocent.

Brenda Daniels testified that if she thought her husband Tom had molested any children, “I’d take the kids out of the house and I’d call police, because it’s not OK.”

Tom Daniels, 49, is facing 12 counts involving five children in incidents that prosecutors say took place in 2003 to 2005 in a day care/foster care home his wife ran in Citrus Heights.

Under questioning from defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine, Brenda Daniels said one of the alleged victims reported an accusation about her husband to her. Daniels, a “mandatory reporter” who is required to forward such allegations to police, said she didn’t because “I didn’t believe her.”

When Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy pressed Daniels on her failure to report the allegations, the witness said, “I’ve known Tom since I was 13-years-old. He never showed any signs of being a molester.”

The trial recessed at the noon break until Tuesday. Brenda Daniels is scheduled to resume her testimony then.

Pastor’s wife defends him on molestation allegations
[Sacramento Bee Blog 11/21/11 by Andy Furillo]

Update 2: Tommy’s wife testifies and accuses girls of being liars. “One of the girls was “superficially charming,” “manipulative,” a provocateur who “loved to stir the pot.” Another girl folded clothes wrong on purpose, just to make the grown-ups mad. Like the rest, she was “cute,” but “a crazy liar.”

Such was Brenda Daniels’ assessment Monday of four of the girls who testified that her husband, Rio Linda Baptist Church Pastor Tommy Gene Daniels, molested them. The pastor’s wife said she distrusted the girls’ truthfulness so much that when one of them told her she’d been molested, Mrs. Daniels didn’t think it was necessary to report the allegation to police – even though she was required by law to forward the accusation to law enforcement.

“I know (the girl) was a liar, and I know Tom very well, and I didn’t think it was a legitimate thing,” Brenda Daniels testified. “I’ve known Tom since I was 13 years old. He never showed any signs of being a molester.”

Tommy Gene Daniels, 49, is accused of 12 counts of child molestation involving five alleged victims. Police and prosecutors say the molestations took place between December 2002 and July 2005 when his wife operated a day care and foster care business out of their home in the 7900 block of Wapiti Place in Citrus Heights.

All five of the girls have testified against Daniels. In taking the stand Monday, Brenda Daniels, under questioning from defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine, attempted to undermine the credibility of four of the accusers. The four had lived in the Daniels home in a respite care program to give their parents a break from their problematic behavior.

The pastor’s wife said she once attended a therapy session in which one of the girls retracted her allegation.

“She was just mad at Poppa Tom,” Brenda Daniels said.

Daniels’ bottom line was that she believed her husband. She said if she thought there was any truth to the allegations, which first came to her attention in the summer of 2005, she likely would have dumped him.

“I probably would have loaded up all my kids, got in the car and called the police,” she said.

Four of the girls had been placed in the Daniels home by a therapist because “we were good at” gaining control of problem kids, she testified.

Brenda Daniels told the jury she deployed motion detectors where some of the girls slept in the living room to keep them from roaming around at night and getting into each others’ stuff. All of them were manipulative liars, she said, and sexually aware by the time when they lived in the Daniels home, even though they were between the ages of 5 and 10.

A fifth girl who testified against Daniels had been placed there by her parents only a couple times a week for day care services. While the other four girls were adopted, the fifth girl lived with her biological parents. Unlike the others, she had no apparent behavioral problems and was not experiencing any difficulties in relating to her parents.

Mrs. Daniels did not offer an explanation why the fifth girl, who was 5 years old at the time of her alleged molestation, would make a false accusation. She suggested, however, that the other four may have gotten the idea to accuse her husband of molestation from the fifth, whose allegations were the first that were reported to police.

On cross-examination, Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy sought to attack Brenda Daniels’ credibility by focusing questions on the revocation of the woman’s day care license in 2003. Among other reasons, the revocation came as a result of a misappropriation of $4,000 and threats her husband made against a foster care agency that blocked the couple’s adoption of a baby boy, according to state Department of Social Services records.

Brenda Daniels agreed that she spent an overpayment from the state, but said it was a mixup and that the amount was only $680. She said she never appealed the administrative law judge’s decision because “we didn’t have the money” to hire a lawyer.

State regulators said Tommy Gene Daniels warned foster agency employees who removed the child from his home he had a gun and they would only be able to retrieve the boy “over my dead body.”

Brenda Daniels described as “laughable” the allegation her husband made threats of gunplay.

“Tom would never say that,” she testified.

Brenda Daniels is scheduled to return to the witness stand today in Sacramento Superior Court in front of Judge Trena H. Burger-Plavan

Wife of pastor Tommy Gene Daniels testifies he didn’t molest girls in Citrus Heights home
[Sacramento Bee 11/22/11 by Andy Furillo]

Two Girl’s Testimony

“Two sisters testified Tuesday that a Baptist preacher on trial for 12 counts of child molestation sexually abused and degraded them in his Citrus Heights home eight years ago.

“Yes,” the older girl, now 14, said, in a nearly inaudible whisper, in a courtroom where 32 strangers stared at her when she was asked if Tommy Gene Daniels touched her in her private areas.

The answer, if the Sacramento Superior Court jury believes it, establishes the girl as the second victim in the trial of the 49-year-old defendant who is still listed on the First Baptist Church of Rio Linda website as its pastor.

When Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy asked for some of the details of the act, the girl replied, “I don’t want to remember.”

“I’ve tried to block it out,” she said.

She was followed to the witness stand by her 13-year-old sister. The younger girl testified tearfully that Daniels made the two of them take off their clothes, lie down on the floor in a closed room and apply substances to their bodies while he sat in a chair and watched.

Prosecutors say the older girl was placed in Daniels’ foster-care home in August 2003 and the younger girl in November of the same year. They say the acts took place sometime between then and December 2004, when their adoptive parents removed them from the Daniels residence on Wapiti Place in Citrus Heights.

Defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine, who has declared his client innocent of all charges, harshly attacked the first girl’s credibility. In his first question to her, he stood at the lawyers’ lectern and asked, “It’s a lot of work to lie, isn’t it?”

Chastaine suggested in his questioning that the girl’s imagination ran wild in a recent videotaped interview with investigators. He recounted her taped comments as reporting that Daniels abused as many as 150 girls, forced her as punishment to remain in a semi-pushup position called a “plank” for an hour at a time, made the girls have sex with boys in the house and that he had stabbed his wife with a knife.

The girl testified she obtained some of the information secondhand through psychotherapist Carla DeRose, who also treated three other of the five alleged victims in the case.

DeRose could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Chastaine said he is likely to call her as a witness when his case gets under way, which could be as soon as Thursday.

Besides the sexual abuse allegation, the girl testified Daniels also made her take cold showers and sleep in wet clothing if she talked out of turn. She said he also made her stand on her head with her feet against a wall if she acted up.

The girls’ mother testified that both of her adoptive daughters had behavioral problems and that she placed them in the Daniels house on the recommendation of Loomis licensed marriage and family therapist Mell LaValley. The mother said she paid Daniels and his wife $30,000 to keep the two girls for better than a year. She said she paid LaValley $10,000.

She testified that she removed the children from the Daniels home based on “God’s leading, to bring them out immediately.” She said she and her husband then noticed a hand-shaped bruise on one of their daughters.

When the girls began acting out several years after their removal from the Daniels home, the mother said she placed the younger one in a different foster home in November 2009 and the older one with DeRose in May or June 2010. It was after the placement with DeRose that the reports of child molestation were forwarded to Citrus Heights police.”

Two girls add their testimony of alleged abuse by Rio Linda preacher
[Sacramento Bee 11/16/11 by Andy Furillo]

Update 3: So, the crux of the defense is to call on a professor of clinical psychology to imply that children lie about sexual abuse (that they would never delay reporting it or keep it quiet).

“Prosecutors offered it as powerful evidence of why children who make molestation allegations ought to be believed, but a defense expert Monday labeled child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome as “junk science.”

University of Nevada professor William O’Donohue testified as the second-to-last witness for Tommy Gene Daniels before the defense rested its case in the Rio Linda pastor’s child molestation trial in Sacramento Superior Court.

O’Donohue, a professor of clinical psychology, called the syndrome “a very problematical theory.”
“I think it’s a false account,” O’Donohue testified. “I think it’s potentially dangerous. I think it’s junk science.”

Earlier in the trial, Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy called UC Davis School of Medicine pediatrics professor Anthony J. Urquiza to testify as an expert on the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome. Urquiza testified that CSAAS theory explains why children are apt to keep their molestation secret. He said its tenets also make it easier to understand victims’ sense of helplessness and entrapment, their tendency to delay reporting allegations of sexual abuse and their relatively high rate – 25 percent – of recanting their stories.

Under questioning from defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine, the Nevada professor said the CSAAS theory “has many problems” and “it’s accepted by no major professional organizations.” He called it “a fringe theory.”

While O’Donohue attacked the theory’s adherence to the scientific method, he did not necessarily disagree with the substance of what it seeks to explain. He agreed molestation victims want to keep the details of what happened to themselves, and he testified it is “generally true” victims take their time to report molestation allegations – half the time more than six months.

He said the 25 percent recantation rate found in some surveys on molestation victims suggests there was some “untruth” to their stories, but he did not make the leap to call the kids liars.

“Basically, now, we don’t have the percentage of children who lie about this,” O’Donohue testified. He said there is no way to establish a “God’s-eye view” of the truthfulness of the accusers.

Macy, in her cross-examination, cited a Canadian study that put the rate of false allegations of child molestation as low as 4 percent. O’Donohue, who said he has made $400,000 and $500,000 as a defense expert in child molestation cases over the past 25 years, said he was aware of the study. He said he also knew about its finding that false reports usually came from relatives, oftentimes in custody disputes, and never from the children themselves.

Also Monday, an adopted daughter of Daniels reluctantly confirmed a statement she gave to police six years ago that her father had disappeared down a hallway for 15 to 20 minutes on the July 5, 2005 afternoon the pastor was accused of molesting a 5-year-old girl in his Citrus Heights home.”

“Macy got the 22-year-old witness to admit what she told police in 2005 – that Daniels had slipped out of the living room of his home for a prolonged time period on the afternoon prosecutors charge he molested the girl.

During the D.A.’s cross- examination Monday, the daughter at first said the statement she gave to police when she was 15 years old was inaccurate. “I believe it was five to 10 minutes,” she said. “He said he was going to the bathroom … Now that I’m older, I remember things better.”

But Macy continued to confront the woman with the report of the police interview written by Citrus Heights investigators after their August 2005 interview. It prompted her finally to say, “It could have been 15 to 20 minutes.”

The time frame is possibly important to corroborating the previous trial testimony of the alleged victim, who is now 12. The girl testified on the first day of trial that she had been sleeping in a rear bedroom off the hallway of the Daniels home when she was molested. The girl identified the intruder as Daniels. She said he came into the room a second time to molest her.

Daniels testified last week that he did open the door to the bedroom, but only to let a cat inside.

The pastor of the First Baptist Church of Rio Linda is accused on 12 counts of molesting five girls in his Wapiti Place home in Citrus Heights between 2003 and 2005. Daniels, 49, and his wife used the residence to provide day care and foster care services.

Macy is expected to call as many as three rebuttal witnesses today. Judge Trena H. Burger-Plavan said she will try to arrange for closing arguments to take place on Thursday, after which she will send the case to the jury. ”

Defense expert: Child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome is ‘junk science’
[Sacramento Bee 11/28/11 by Andy Furillo]

Update 4: “A prosecutor told a Sacramento Superior Court jury today that a pastor accused of 12 counts of child molestation turned his Citrus Heights home “into a house of horror for five little girls” and that “it’s time to put a stop to that.”

Defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine countered in his closing argument that his client is innocent of all the charges.

“Tom Daniels is an innocent man who sits in the worst chair in the entire planet, accused of something he didn’t do,” Chastaine said.

At the conclusion of the closing arguments, Judge Trena H. Burger-Plavan sent the jury out to begin its deliberations.

Prosecution, defense offer opposite closing views in Baptist pastor’s trial
[Sacramento Bee 12/1/11 by Andy Furillo]

“Will the jury accept the word of five little girls who say they were molested by a serial sex criminal who lurked beneath the cloak of a pastor?

Or will the panel find that Tommy Gene Daniels – military veteran, family man, religious leader – was a big-hearted helper who opened his Citrus Heights home to wayward children only to become victimized by them?

In final arguments Thursday to a Sacramento Superior Court jury, prosecution and defense attorneys boiled their cases down to who should be believed – the girls or the pastor.

After the jury heard the presentations, Judge Trena H. Burger-Plavan sent out the panel to deliberate. The outcome will determine if the Rio Linda First Baptist Church pastor regains his reputation or if he will be cast down among the lowest of the earth.

Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy portrayed Daniels as a fitting candidate for the ranks of the despised. She said he preyed on troubled girls nobody would believe and intimidated them with his massive, 6-foot-3, 400-pound frame, to gratify his perversions by touching them in private areas or making them do so to themselves.

“Seven nine seven five Wapiti Place in Citrus Heights was a home for some people,” Macy said. “But it was a house of horror for five little girls.”

Defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine argued Daniels had been unfairly marked by four lying and manipulative 5- to 8-year-old girls who passed their stories on to a suggestible fifth girl. Together, he said, they destroyed a U.S. Air Force veteran, a man of the cloth, a father with a way with problem children.

“You open up your home to help people out, and this is what you get for it,” Chastaine said. Daniels “is an innocent man who sits in the worst chair in the entire planet, accused of something he didn’t do. Mr. Daniels’ life is in your hands. It is time to let him go home,” the lawyer said.

Daniels, 49, is accused of 12 counts of child molestation of the five girls between December 2002 and July 2005. Four were “respite” children, placed in his home by adoptive parents who found it difficult to control the girls. The fifth girl’s parents used the Daniels home for day care.

The trial took nine court days over 2 1/2 weeks. Macy based her case mostly on the word of the alleged victims. Chastaine countered with Daniels’ own testimony, along with character witnesses from Daniels’ church. He also elicited the testimony of the defendant’s wife and children and other kids who once lived in his house and their parents who said they never saw him do anything inappropriate.

“It all comes down to who you believe,” prosecutor Macy told the jury.

Macy described the “respite girls” as “perfect victims” for the defendant. She agreed they all had a propensity to tell lies, but Macy said that Daniels used that characteristic to set them up.

“What better victims for someone who wants to molest a child?” Macy said. His mindset, the prosecutor said, was, “Who’s going to believe her over me?”

The complaint charges Daniels with only 12 counts, but Macy recounted one girl who testified she was molested “more than 50 times.”

Another girl froze up on the witness stand and identified Daniels as her molester only after minutes of painful silence. Macy said the girl illustrated credibility. Who would submit to invasive medical exams and embarrassing testimony if nothing happened, Macy suggested.

Assessing Daniels’ testimony, Macy said, “Everybody else was lying or mistaken or had a false memory. When everybody else is wrong, and you’re the only one who is right, doesn’t that tell you something? Don’t let him fool you,” she implored.

Chastaine built his case largely around Daniels’ “good character” and “trustworthiness” against the “the people who made the allegations.”

The defense lawyer reminded jurors of the testimony of church women, Daniels’ wife and respite girls who grew up in the Daniels house – all of whom said they would leave their children in the pastor’s care.

“The people who know him best – everyday people who know him – they said they trust him with their most prized possessions, their children,” Chastaine said. Daniels “had to fool every single one of those people if he is what Ms. Macy says he is, a predatory child molester,” the defense lawyer argued.

Chastaine noted his since-slimmed-down client’s enormous size around the time of the accusations. How could a 400-pound man not be seen by anybody other than his accusers, skulking around a small crowded house molesting girls dozens of times?

“Because there wasn’t anything to see,” Chastaine said.”

Sacramento jury sent to decide if Baptist pastor molested 5 girls
[Sacramento Bee 12/2/11 by Andy Furillo]

Two comments in the 12/2 article mention that Tommy’s behavior in daycare was “intimidating” and that the daycare had multiple complaints.

REFORM Puzzle Pieces

Update 5/July 18, 2013

An internet search shows that Tommy Daniels was convicted and sentenced to 158 years in prison.

”

A Sacramento Superior Court jury today convicted Rio LInda First Baptist Church pastor Tommy Gene Daniels of molesting five girls in his Citrus Heights home.

The jury found Daniels, 49, guilty on 11 of the 12 counts filed against him.

“I’m happy for the girls,” said Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy. “I thought there was definitely evidence there” supporting the verdicts, she said.

Judge Trene H. Burger-Plavan scheduled Daniels’ sentencing for Jan. 13. Macy said Daniels is facing a life term.

Defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine said he was disappointed with the verdict and that he plans to appeal.

Baptist pastor Daniels guilty of molesting girls in Citrus Heights home

[Sacramento Bee 12/8/11 by Andy Furillo]

“Rio Linda Baptist Church Pastor Tommy Gene Daniels was sentenced to 158 years to life in prison today for molesting five little girls in a respite and child-care operation his family ran out of his Citrus Heights home.

In handing down the term to the 49-year-old Daniels, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Trena H. Burger-Plavan told the pastor he “took advantage of his position of trust and confidence with very young victims.”

Daniels, exhibiting facial grimaces throughout the sentencing hearing, made no comment. He has continued to maintain his innocence. His attorney, Michael L. Chastaine, filed a motion for a new trial that the judge rejected. Chastaine said afterwards he intends to appeal the Dec. 8 verdict handed down by the Sacramento jury.

The five victims in the case were between the ages of 5 and 13 when Daniels touched them inappropriately while they were in his family’s care in his Wapiti Place residence. The molestations took place in his house between December 2002 and August 2007.

One of Daniels’ victims, who is now 12, began to read her victim’s impact statement in the courtroom. She said the molestation “changed me forever.” When the girl began to cry, her mother finished the statement where the young victim said she is “terrified of the dark” and has a recurring vision of a “blurred face with a creepy smile” where Daniels’ “points at me as if to say, ‘I’m coming for you.'”

“I’ve tried to forget what happened, but I have not been able to and probably will never be able to,” the girl’s statement said.”

Judge sentences pastor to 158 years to life in molestation case

[Sacramento Bee 3/2/12 by Andy Furillo]