Ex-Official Tells Court He Didn’t Sexually Abuse Girls

A former Palmdale city councilman and sexual abuse investigator took the witness stand Wednesday to defend himself against charges that he molested four young girls.

Kevin Carney, 49, spoke matter-of-factly and showed little emotion as he tried to explain his relationship with the girls and to deny that he had molested them.

“Absolutely not,” he replied repeatedly when asked by his defense attorney in Los Angeles Superior Court if he had abused the girls.

Carney said his job as sergeant supervising a child abuse unit for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department made him uniquely sensitive to victims of child sexual abuse. “You would have to be made of stone” not to be affected by the cases, he said. “And, I’m not made of stone.”

Carney is charged with 16 counts of molestation-related crimes, ranging from lewd acts to unlawful sexual intercourse.

He faces multiple life sentences if convicted.

His attorney, Milton Grimes, contends that the girls’ stories were fabricated, and has suggested that the accounts may be financially and politically motivated.

In the past two weeks, four girls from the Palmdale-Lancaster area have testified that Carney molested them.

Two neighborhood girls have accused Carney of luring them to his den to see baby turtles. Once there, the girls have said, he touched them inappropriately. One girl testified that he improperly touched her “about a hundred times.”

Carney said he did touch the girls’ hands but only to show them how to handle the fragile baby turtles.

He said he “felt like the wind was knocked out of me” when he learned they had accused him of molesting them.

He said he had known one of the girls since she came home from the hospital as a newborn.

Carney, whose testimony is expected to continue today, also testified on Wednesday about a case involving a 15-year-old girl.

Carney said he was friends with the girl’s mother, a child abuse investigator for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.

He said he felt sorry for the girl because her father, who lives in Guam, did not pay enough attention to her. He said he served as an “uncle figure” for her.

He often took her to movies and would take her to the orchards near her school to teach her to drive.

He said he stopped seeing the girl for several months in 1997 after he was accused by the two neighborhood girls of touching them inappropriately.

“I felt like everybody was looking at me,” he said. “If you’ve been called a child molester, it changes your comfort level around kids. I could feel my skin tightening when I was around her.”

But he said he resumed the relationship with the girl a few months later at the insistence of her mother. The girl testified that Carney molested her over an 8-year period in his car, at her house and even at the child abuse unit.