The 36-year-old boyfriend of a teenage girl who went missing in 2019 has been charged with two felony counts of sexual abuse of children “resulting from child sexual abuse material found on his cell phone,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen announced Tuesday.
Edmund Davis was arrested Monday afternoon in Chinook, Montana. The material was allegedly found on a cellphone he tossed into a garbage can during a police search of his home on July 26, according to charging documents filed in Hill County District Court.
Alicia Navarro, “a high function autistic child” who vanished from Glendale, Arizona when she was 14, walked into a police station in Montana on July 23 to identify herself and ask for help to get off a list of missing juveniles “as she wanted to begin living her life as an adult,” the documents say. Navarro, now 18, had been living with Davis, police said in the filing, which identifies Davis as her boyfriend.
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When cops visited Davis’ home on July 26, “Alicia stated no one was present at the apartment but her,” the charging documents say. But officers “observed Edmund in the Kitchen behind Alicia,” the documents say. “Edmund was seen throwing a cellphone into the trash and placing items on top of said phone.”
The phone belonged to Davis, according to cops. When investigators viewed the contents of it, they found more than 80 images of boys and girls being sexually abused, some of them under the age of 5, according to the charging docs.
The cache of material included photos of infants, toddlers, and “prepubescent” children, at least one of whom was in bondage gear, the documents state. There “were also a multitude of pictures found that are computer generated or animated content showing apparent children being sexualized,” the documents say.
It remains unclear why Navarro vanished, how she got to Montana, or where she had been for the past several years, according to police. When she first reappeared, cops released a new photo of her in which a Glendale PD spokesman said she didn’t “look much different than she did when she disappeared... her appearance is that of a very young looking lady.”
The spokesman told reporters at the time that Navarro was “very apologetic to what she has put her mother through.”
Davis, who has not been charged in relation to Navarro’s disappearance, was being held in the Hill County Detention Center on $1 million bond on Tuesday. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison. A Navarro family spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Tuesday.
