Town Shaken by Accusations That Don’t Fit the Man

When this high desert town gets a bad rap, few are quicker to defend it than longtime resident Kevin Wright Carney.

“A lot of people like to point out the bad things that go on up here,” he said a few months ago. “They love to point out the child abuse, the meth and the gang problems, which came to us from down below.”

Down below is Los Angeles, 70 miles south of Palmdale, over the San Gabriel Mountains and a world away in crime, traffic and urban misfortune.

Yet it is in a downtown jail cell, the same one used by O.J. Simpson, that Carney--a sheriff’s sergeant and former Palmdale councilman--is being held in isolation while facing 17 felony charges of child molestation and abuse. Three weeks ago, in a note penned from jail, Carney, 48, resigned from the City Council.

Soft-spoken and reserved, Carney does not fit the cop stereotype, friends say. He is working on a novel about the Titanic, sings with the Antelope Valley Master Chorale, dabbles in watercolors and collects water turtles.

The allegations against him threw this community--an orderly grid of numbered and lettered streets--out of whack.

For some, who presume guilt, Carney is tainted, a sad tale they would prefer to bury in the desert dust and forget. “He broke our trust,” they whisper. “We were deceived.”

But Carney’s family and supporters say he is innocent. They do not believe the charges. Their view of him is unchanged: a passionate Republican, grounded in family values; a former school board member who spoke his mind, political correctness be damned; a loving family man who speaks four languages and writes poetry.

“He’s like a brother to me,” said Michele Lejeune, his former campaign treasurer. “I feel I know him as any best friend can know their friend. I don’t believe he is guilty.”

As a school board member from 1995-99 and its president for a year, Carney unabashedly strove “to tell the world he is conservative,” said Bill Olenick, now president of the Antelope Valley Union High School board.

“He’s very intolerant of gays and deviant lifestyles. Publicly. On the record,” Olenick said. “He explains gays as creatures of God, but [like] a two-headed turtle is deviant and abnormal.”

Carney was meticulous in his work on the school board, paper-clipping pages of textbooks that didn’t pass muster, Olenick said.

“You couldn’t find a more hard-working, dedicated public servant [than] Kevin Wright Carney,” he added.

Carney has pleaded not guilty to molesting four Antelope Valley girls who were younger than 14 years old when the alleged incidents began. Some charges date to when Carney supervised the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s north county child abuse unit.

Carney’s career included stints at the Crescenta Valley and Lancaster stations. He will be granted retirement next month at his request.

Most sheriff’s colleagues declined to talk about Carney’s 23 years with the department.

“It’s too painful to talk about,” said one.

Sgt. Mike Becker, who never worked with Carney, said many deputies knew him to be “a good supervisor and very supportive of employees.”

But in politics, Carney’s anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-diversity views clashed with liberal foes.

“He [appointed] himself to be the moral judge over all,” said Diana Beard-Williams, who publishes a political newsletter in the Antelope Valley. “That’s quite a position to put yourself in, when you are not God.”

If history and textbooks do not paint whites “as benevolent, loving souls, the epitome of intellectual wisdom, Kevin wants to call that social engineering,” Beard-Williams said.

Carney objected to updated history, she said, citing the determination that Thomas Jefferson had at least one child by his slave, Sally Hemings. “He’s very dogmatic and rigid.”

Growing up with a father who served in the Army and worked as an engineer, Carney and his family lived in Georgia, North Carolina, Alaska and Ghana. Eventually, they settled in the San Fernando Valley.

A 1969 graduate of Chatsworth High School, Carney was active in the choir and Thespian Troupe and was Charlie Chancellor, the school’s crown-wearing mascot. As a junior, he walked precincts for Richard Nixon and was a yell king, one of 10 varsity cheerleaders.

Terri Robinson, who was song queen, Carney’s yell squad partner, said he did not stand out among the other students.

“I remember him being quiet,” Robinson said. “Yet in the [yearbook] picture, he looks outgoing and vivacious.”

At Cal State Northridge, Carney majored in political science. He has an ear for language, and over the years, picked up French, Spanish, German and Italian.

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Carney said he clearly remembered his initial visit to the Antelope Valley in 1985, when he and his wife were thinking about relocating with their daughter and two sons. What struck him was the friendliness of strangers. In the San Fernando Valley, longtime neighbors did not even know one another, he recalled.

“It’s the world’s largest small town,” he said in an interview shortly after his Nov. 2 City Council victory, sitting in the elegant burgundy-and-blue living room of his two-story home.

His family was one of the first to move into the quiet, tidy tract years before a mall opened nearby. Friends describe them as close-knit and loving. His auburn-haired wife, Kathleen, 64, is a top local Avon saleswoman. Their children are young adults now.

The only sign of family discord came in 1988 when Carney filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. But the matter was dropped five months later.

Carney, a Roman Catholic, said his family-value politics have never wavered. He has fretted over how to preserve the city’s small-town flavor and how to combat encroaching gang activity.

The Antelope Valley, he said, is a traditionally conservative region that has embraced his views: opposition to discussion of homosexuality and “non-health” sex issues in schools, a call for fewer apartments and low-income housing, and support for a Palmdale hospital and more law enforcement officers.

“Look at this new neighborhood; it’s a nice one,” he said. “People move here because of the quality of life.”

Preserving that lifestyle from elements “down below” is a key tenet of the Antelope Valley Republican Assembly, a powerful conservative political group that endorsed Carney.

In the November elections, out of a field of 18 candidates, the 12 backed by the assembly won seats, including Carney. The group’s political clout extends to the city councils and school boards of Palmdale and Lancaster and the high school and community college boards.

Carney’s victory was stunning. Just four days before the election, he was arrested after a 14-year-old girl told Lancaster sheriff’s deputies that he had molested her.

His chagrined campaign staff stopped making calls and Carney lost three key endorsements. But he won, largely because of a bank of absentee ballots.

Much of Carney’s political groundwork was laid in 1995, as one of seven conservative Christian school board candidates who crafted a nine-point “Contract with Antelope Valley Families.” Their tenets included opposition to teaching about multiculturalism and sexual orientation and support for campuswide moments of silence and an American Patriotism and Heritage Month.

Carney won a seat on the Antelope Valley Union High School District board that year, continuing a religious conservative majority.

Two years later, Carney was investigated for allegedly inappropriately touching two neighborhood girls who visited his backyard water turtle collection. But no charges were filed, and Carney pushed ahead with plans to run for mayor. He lost the 1997 election, blaming dirty politics for the allegations that had ruined his candidacy.

Attorney R. Rex Parris stood by Carney when those accusations surfaced. After Carney passed a lie detector test, Parris offered to be his attorney. But the need never arose.

The two first met when Parris started the Lancaster Child Abuse Task Force about five years ago and Carney was supervisor of the child abuse detail.

“I thought he would be the person who would take the child abuse problems seriously,” Parris said. “He was the one who said, ‘Look, it takes three days to screen the kids, sometimes longer,’ because they had to go all the way down to County-USC Hospital.”

The Antelope Valley has historically reported the largest number of child abuse cases in the county, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Last year, the total was 628, and more than half were sexual abuse cases. Six deputies are assigned to the Antelope Valley’s child abuse unit, the department’s largest such detail.

“It is not strangers. It is relatives, a close personal friend,” said Becker, who heads the north county child abuse unit. “Antelope Valleyians are molesting their own kids.”

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Sooner or later, the truth will come out, says the mother of one of the alleged victims. The Times does not identify victims of alleged sexual abuse or their parents.

“God is the final judge,” she said.

The charges against Carney and recent charges against two other Antelope Valley deputies in separate, child-related sex crimes, have rocked the community.

Among many of his staunchest political allies, Carney is now a pariah.

“Everyone is trying to cover their political butts on this deal,” Olenick observed.

“If, in fact, this is true, we were just as duped as the voters were,” said Frank Visco, founder of the Antelope Valley Republican Assembly who dropped his endorsement of Carney after his arrest. “I’m disappointed, but I’ve never been his buddy.”

Those defections of loyalty sadden Lejeune, who said that, when she was recovering from a painful accident, Carney helped her through her darkest hours.

“To withdraw support and condemn a man before he is tried, much less convicted, is just as much a crime as anything else,” she said.