Rape Case Called ‘Horror’ of Child-Protective System : Justice: County grand jury report details how a father was wrongly accused of sexually assaulting his 8-year-old daughter.

The “monumental mishandling” of a case involving a father wrongly accused of raping his 8-year-old daughter underscores the flaws in the county’s child-protective system, the San Diego County Grand Jury said Tuesday.

The girl, named Alicia, was raped and sodomized, then taken away from her family for 2 1/2 years before DNA tests confirmed that her father could not have been the attacker.

The case sparked a yearlong grand jury investigation. Last February, the grand jury called for “profound change” in the child-protective system, which is designed to identify, then safeguard children who are abused or neglected.

Too often, the panel said in February, an accused parent is assumed guilty of molesting a child until proven innocent, and families are ripped apart unnecessarily. The grand jury said Tuesday that the Alicia case symbolizes the flaws in the system, and underscores the “horrors which can result when carelessness and zealotry team up.”

Prompted by the grand jury’s blistering February report, the county Board of Supervisors approved in April a wide-ranging reform package. The board ordered better training for social workers, fairer rules of investigations and a greater emphasis on keeping families together wherever possible.

With change at hand, Richard Macfie, foreman of the grand jury, said Tuesday that the panel decided it was still important to issue a detailed report of the Alicia case. “It seemed to cover all the things that can go wrong” in a child-abuse investigation, Macfie said.

Because of mistakes by police, prosecutors, social workers, the county counsel’s office, therapists and the Juvenile Court, an “entire family was abused for almost three years,” Macfie said.

“Anyone in any of these offices could have stopped the process by which preconceptions of guilt almost destroyed a family,” he said. “But no one did.”

The girl was assaulted May 8, 1989. She told detectives, social workers and therapists that a man had come through her bedroom window, carried her outside, “hurt her” and brought her home.

Albert Carder Jr. had been attacking neighborhood girls, sometimes after coming through the bedroom window. Authorities ignored evidence, including a footprint outside Alicia’s bedroom window, linking Carder to Alicia’s attack. He is serving a 25-year sentence for attacks on four girls who lived within blocks of Alicia’s house.

Investigators, however, refused to believe Alicia’s story, the grand jury said. Instead, authorities blamed the attack on her father, a chief petty officer in the Navy, and took the girl away from her father, mother and brother. Adoption proceedings were begun.

After 13 months of counseling, Alicia abruptly blamed her father for the attack. He was formally charged with attacking her and she testified against him at a preliminary hearing.

In May, 1991, authorities discovered semen stains on Alicia’s panties and nightgowns. Somehow, the grand jury said, those stains had been overlooked.

DNA tests on those stains concluded that they could not have come from the father. Instead, the tests pointed to Carder.

After a second series of DNA tests reached the same conclusion, prosecutors dropped the criminal charges against the father. At a court hearing, San Diego Superior Court Judge Frederic Link took the unusual step of explicitly finding the father innocent.

Adoption proceedings halted. The County Department of Social Services reunited the family.

But the conclusion, Macfie said, is “not altogether a happy one. The family is financially overcome, they have lost three years of their lives to the most damaging form of mental trauma and the child will require psychiatric assistance indefinitely.”