Press Release

Father Convicted of Serial Molest of Adopted Daughter

(Woodland, CA) – June 26, 2009 District Attorney Jeff Reisig announced that on Thursday afternoon a Yolo County jury convicted 42 year old Ajay Kumar Dev, a former Davis resident, of the serial molest and rape of his adopted daughter. The violations occurred between January 1999 and December 2004.

Mr. Dev, a native of the country of Nepal, had immigrated to the Davis area with his parents when he was 13. He is a graduate of Chico State and worked for the California Water Resources Board as an engineer and was active in the Davis Nepali community. In 1999 he and his wife brought the victim, a distant relative of Mr. Dev’s, who at the time was 15 years old, to the United States. She was to live with them and go to school here ostensibly to give her a better education.

The victim had been officially adopted by Mr. Dev and his wife in December of 1999 and, according to the victim’s testimony, Mr. Dev began inappropriately touching her within the first couple of weeks of her arrival and later progressed to forced sexual assault and rape on a weekly basis. The assaults continued after the victim turned 18 and was attending Sacramento City College but still lived in the Dev household. The victim moved out of the home in December of 2004, and Mr. Dev continued to try to sexually abuse the victim and even offered to pay her to do so. Mr. Dev threatened to get a gun and shoot himself and the victim if she didn’t allow him to continue to abuse her, which ultimately led to the victim reporting the situation to law enforcement.

Detective Mark Hermann of the Davis Police Dept. was assigned the case and while interviewing the victim he had her call the defendant on the phone. During the recorded phone call, the victim engaged him in a conversation about the abusive relationship and whether she should tell her school counselor that he, Mr. Dev, was the cause of her three abortions. What ensued was a conversation where Mr. Dev admitted the abuse and ultimately tried to talk the victim out of reporting it.

A search warrant that was served on the Dev home in Davis found child pornography on the computers. This confirmed the victim’s story that Mr. Dev had shown her such pornography prior to some of the assaults. The case against Mr. Dev was not filed until two years later, however, because the victim had returned to Nepal to attend her sister’s wedding and was imprisoned there on charges brought about by a relative of the defendant’s alleging that she had the wrong date of birth on her passport. After court proceedings in Nepal that lasted a year and a half, she was finally issued a new passport and, with help from law enforcement and the U.S. Embassy in Nepal, she was able to
return to the United States, at which time charges were filed. While she had been in Nepal, Mr. Dev had traveled to Nepal and phoned her telling her to drop the charges and not to return to the United States.

The trial lasted for two months. After the jury deliberated for one week, Mr. Dev was convicted of 76 felony counts including 23 counts of forcible rape; 23 counts of forcible sexual assault; 27 counts of lewd acts with a minor; and 3 counts of attempting to dissuade a witness. The jury hung on three of the counts and returned not guilty verdicts on 13 others. Mr. Dev, who was remanded to custody without bail after having been free on bail for the three years it took to get the case to trial, faces between 72 and 392 years in prison. Sentencing is set for August 7, 2009 in Dept. 2 before Judge Timothy L. Fall who presided over the trial. For more information, contact Ann Hurd at (530) 666-8180.