The man who authorities describe as the boyfriend of Alicia Navarro — the teenage girl who walked into a Montana police station four years after she vanished in Arizona — was arrested on charges of child sexual abuse after explicit images were found on his cellphone, officials said Tuesday.
The photos were found on a phone allegedly belonging to Edmund Davis, 36, while investigators searched his Havre, Montana, apartment in July for evidence in the Alicia Navarro case, according to the Montana Attorney General’s Office. Navarro was 14 when she disappeared from her mother’s home on Sept. 15, 2019.
In July, an 18-year-old Navarro went to a police station in the small Montana town of Havre and identified herself as the missing girl. The charges against Davis are not related to Navarro, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said.
The phone contained images of a “child or children 12 years of age or younger engaged in sexual conduct actual or simulated,” according to charging documents in the case. The documents list another victim who was under the age of 16.
He was charged with two felony counts of sexual abuse of children.
Investigators said they found over 80 images on Davis’ phone, according to court documents filed Oct. 16 seeking Davis’ arrest.
He was taken into custody Monday in Chinook, Montana, by the Montana Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation and the Blaine County Sheriff’s Department. He remains jailed at the Hill County Detention Center on a $1 million bond.
Attorney information was not available for Davis.
Authorities said nine of the images received a “maturity rating” from Phoenix Children’s Hospital and it was determined that seven of the pictures were rated as children under the age of 13 and two contained children under the age of five, the documents state.
The documents describe graphic images investigators said they found on Davis’ cell phone as well as a laptop. The victims are described as being “prepubescent” females and “an apparent young boy,” according to the documents.
An agent also noted “the presence of other images of infants and toddlers,” the documents state.
The attorney general’s office said Davis, who is described in the court documents as being Navarro’s boyfriend, tried to discard his cell phone during the search at his home.
Authorities said when officers arrived July at the apartment Navarro and Davis shared together on July 26, Navarro initially said no one was home but police saw Davis in the kitchen “throwing a cellphone into the trash and placing items on top of said phone.”
Authorities have not said how Navarro ended up in Montana or how long she had been there. Jose Santiago, a spokesman for Glendale police, previously said that when Navarro went to the Montana police station she “basically asked for help to clear her off of a missing juvenile list.” In video released by authorities, she was heard telling detectives that no one had hurt her.
After Navarro was located, her mother, Jessica Nuñez, released a video calling it a “miracle” that her daughter had been found safe.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
