D.A. Won’t Prosecute Simi Officer : Police: Kevin Medley has been fired. He has married the Explorer Scout who was 17 when they began a sexual relationship.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office announced Friday it will not prosecute a Simi Valley police officer who had an ongoing sexual relationship with a 17-year-old Explorer Scout he recently married.

But while Kevin Medley, 35, was able to avoid criminal charges, he was not able to keep the job he had held for nearly three years. Medley was fired Thursday by the Simi Valley Police Department for his involvement with the teen-ager.

Representatives of the former officer and the teen-ager--who were married in Las Vegas on Oct. 17, with her parents serving as witnesses--characterize the couple’s relationship as a case of true love. But prosecutors said they would have pressed charges if they had willing witnesses in the case.

“The main barrier was the attitude of the minor, now Mrs. Medley, as well as her mother and father,” Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Lela Henke-Dobroth said.

“Without their cooperation, it would have been an uphill battle. The end result very likely could have been Mrs. Medley refusing to testify and the court ordering her to testify or holding her in contempt. . . . We did not want to be put in that position, we did not want to put the family in that position and it would have been a futile effort.”

Medley’s attorney, Darryl E. Mounger, said not only does his client believe prosecution would have been unwarranted, he wants his job back and is prepared to fight for it. Mounger said he will file an appeal with the city early next week in an attempt to have his client reinstated on the grounds that he believed the teen-ager was at least 18.

“He met this young lady and when he was talking to her she said she was in college and he assumed she was 18,” Mounger said. “He says he did not know. He had no idea she graduated (from) high school at age 16.”

Prosecutors don’t buy the claim, saying the teen-ager told the officer how old she was when they met and that “he expressed to her, a least two times after that, that he was concerned about her age and losing his job because of it.”

In a 10-page report on her office’s decision not to prosecute, Henke-Dobroth traced the couple’s relationship from their first meeting in March, when the teen-ager was working in the department’s Explorer Scout program.

The program, which now has about 20 members, gives youths ages 14 to 20 a background in law enforcement that could lead to a career.

After going on ride-alongs together in March and April, the couple first had sex in Medley’s residence in July--shortly after her 17th birthday, according to Henke-Dobroth’s report. After that initial encounter, Medley approached the girl’s mother and formally requested her permission to have a sexual relationship with the minor, which, the report said, she granted.

In interviews with investigators, the teen-ager described about 11 acts of sexual intercourse with Medley between July and October. She said they mainly occurred in his home--which he was sharing with a girlfriend at the time--or at her residence. Once, she said, they went to a motel.

The girlfriend moved out Oct. 6 and, after hearing rumors about the couple, Simi Valley Police Chief Paul Miller suspended Medley with pay on Oct. 12 and began an investigation. The department on Oct. 20 presented 109 pages of reports and transcripts to the district attorney’s office for review.

Miller said last week that he favored scrapping the department’s Explorer program in light of the recent incident. The chief fired two officers in 1987 after reports that they had sexual relations with a 16-year-old Explorer Scout.

Shortly after that, the department instituted new guidelines barring officers from socializing with Explorer Scouts except as part of their participation in the program.

Mounger said the girl voluntarily took a leave of absence from her Explorer duties, specifically so that she could date Medley and not violate the policy. But Simi Valley Police Capt. Jerry Boyce said Friday that even if that were true, it would not excuse Medley for having sexual relations with a minor.

Henke-Dobroth agreed. “The fact is that he is a police officer and he well knows that having sexual relations with a person under the age of 18 is a criminal offense,” she said. “When he engages in this type of criminal conduct, it flies in the face of what he was sworn to uphold.”

And, in addition to questioning the officer’s judgment, the prosecutor wondered Friday whether the couple’s wedding was motivated by true love or the police investigation in progress at the time.

“I think it’s suspect to say the very least, that they happened to get married a week or so after the initial interviews were conducted,” she said.

But Mounger said Medley, who has never been married, genuinely fell in love with the teen-ager he discovered was underage only when the investigation began.

“Sometimes, when a man and a woman meet, that magic occurs and they fall in love,” Mounger said. “This is boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl falls in love with boy and she happens to be 17. I don’t imagine there would be any problem if she was 70.”