WOODLAND — When Frank Rees used methamphetamine with his fiancée Samantha Green one February morning, he “set a chain of events in motion” that resulted in the death of their infant son Justice Rees, Yolo County prosecutors argued Friday in their involuntary-manslaughter case against the Woodland man.
Rees’ defense attorney, meanwhile, called Green a “manipulative, narcissistic” woman who bears sole responsibility for Justice’s death, as it was she who took the 19-day-old baby into a frigid Knights Landing slough and kept him outdoors all night, causing him to die of exposure.
For that, a jury convicted her last fall of second-degree murder.
Justice Rees lived only 19 days. Courtesy photo
After Green was sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison, the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office set its sights on Rees, alleging that he created a life-threatening situation for his newborn son by allowing his meth-addled fiancée to care for him on Feb. 23, 2015, despite warnings from Child Welfare Services for the couple to quit their drug use and seek treatment for their addictions.
In addition to involuntary manslaughter, Rees, 31, is charged with child endangerment, administering methamphetamine and eavesdropping.
Whether the charges will stand is now up to Yolo Superior Court Judge Paul Richardson, who after hearing evidence over three afternoons last week asked attorneys to submit briefs on their positions in the case. Further arguments and Richardson’s ruling are scheduled for July 6.
New information
Rees’ preliminary hearing was largely a rehash of Green’s trial, featuring testimony about Green and Rees’ volatile, drug-fueled relationship; their encounters with Child Welfare Services after Justice tested positive for methamphetamine at birth; and the events surrounding Justice’s disappearance and death.
But prosecutors offered new information as well, including a video Rees allegedly secretly recorded of a distraught Green on Feb. 20, 2015, in the garage of the home they shared with Rees’ parents. The recording is the basis of the eavesdropping charge.
In it, the couple argues over Rees’ infidelity and their drug use, and Rees calls Green “twisted” for using meth with their baby in the room.
“Get the f— out of my life, please,” he tells her.
Prosecutors also played an audio recording of Rees’ interview with a Yolo County sheriff’s detective about a week after Justice’s death, during which he denied knowing Green abused drugs during her pregnancy and claimed the couple “followed through” with their agreement with child welfare workers to quit using and seek treatment.
But in the same interview, he acknowledged that he allowed Green to take care of Justice, along with his four other young children from a prior relationship, after using methamphetamine because the drug would “mellow her out.”
“She would turn into supermom, I swear to God. She was totally fine,” Rees said, also admitting that he and Green tried scoring dope the day after Justice’s body was found.
“I’m trying to numb the pain, man,” Rees said. “I don’t want to get high ever again, bro.”
Two years later, on Feb. 7, 2017, a sheriff’s deputy serving a restraining and move-out order on Rees, requested by his parents, encountered Rees and his pregnant girlfriend outside the family’s Woodland home. Both were in possession of methamphetamine, Deputy Gary Hallenbeck testified Thursday.
Rod Beede, Rees’ defense attorney, objected to Hallenbeck’s testimony, questioning its relevance to the involuntary manslaughter case. Prosecutor Ryan Couzens said it shows Rees’ pattern of behavior demonstrating a “conscious disregard” for human life.
Beede argued that conscious disregard is an element of second-degree murder, not involuntary manslaughter, which requires a reckless or criminally negligent act. But Judge Richardson allowed the testimony to stand, saying “it does shed light on whether or not a person understood and respects the risk.”
Couzens also attempted to elicit testimony about a 2009 accident in Montana in which Rees struck and injured his son with a vehicle, and a second incident in Lake County when he fell asleep in his vehicle with his children inside, but Richardson ruled it irrelevant to the current case.
Events recounted
According to testimony from Green’s trial and last week’s hearing, Rees and Green briefly separated the weekend after the garage argument but reunited after a couple of days. They were intimate during the early hours of Feb. 23, 2015, during which Rees injected methamphetamine into Green’s rectum.
“That’s how she likes to get high,” Rees told sheriff’s Detective Dean Nyland, the lead investigator of Justice’s death, in the interview recording played in court.
The next morning, Green got up and took Rees’ four older children to school. The couple then made plans to gas up the family’s vehicles and take one of them up to Knights Landing to pick up a friend, Monica Coombs, to come help Green care for baby Justice. Rees told Green they’d pick her up on Ninth Street and showed her a Google map of the location.
But another argument ensued after Rees suggested a possible threesome with Coombs. Green drove home with Justice, while Rees headed north to Knights Landing. At some point, Green had a change of heart, texting Rees, “Babe, I love you. I’m on my way.”
By then, however, Rees and Coombs were parked on a rural road, where they “might have fooled around,” Rees later admitted to authorities. It would be another 20 to 30 minutes before he received the text.
Late that morning, Green drove with her baby up to Knights Landing, parked her vehicle on a cul-de-sac and walked with the infant — clad only in a cotton onesie — down to Ridge Cut Slough. She swam with Justice across the waterway and stayed outdoors with him overnight, waking the next morning to discover he had died.
Green emerged from the slough on the evening of Feb. 24, claiming to have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, and that her baby was missing — one of several changing explanations she’d eventually offer for being in the slough. An overnight search for Justice ensued, ending the next morning when a deputy found his tiny body propped against a tree.
It was Green’s sister who initially reported the mother and baby missing after Green failed to return home as planned and pick up Rees’ other children from school. Rees, who was intimate a second time with Coombs on the evening of the 23rd, never filed his own report.
“He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction that he was that concerned she was gone,” Nyland testified Friday.
A tearful Samantha Green is led away by Yolo Superior Court bailiffs after she was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of her 19-day-old son, Justice Rees. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo
Beede, meanwhile, tried eliciting testimony from Nyland showing that Green was an independent woman with a jealous streak whose motivation in taking baby Justice to Knights Landing was to confront Rees with Coombs and “make a huge scene about it.”
“She is a very strong-willed person, correct?” Beede asked.
“I think that’s what she would like to be,” Nyland replied. “I don’t think that’s the real Samantha Green, though.”
“Her desire the entire time was that they be a family, and she was frustrated that that was not what Mr. Rees wanted,” Nyland later said. As to whether she wanted to confront Rees, “I never got that out of her.”
Responsibility
Although it was Green whose actions directly caused Justice to die, “Frank Rees is responsible for that death as well,” Supervising Deputy District Attorney Rob Gorman said Friday in summarizing the prosecution’s case.
In addition to ignoring the safety plan that he and Green created with Child Welfare Services in order to maintain custody of their baby, and continuing to use drugs, Rees allowed Green to care solely for Justice and the other children within hours of her meth use.
Later, after receiving Green’s text indicating she was on her way to join him in Knights Landing, rather than go and find her, “he carries on with Monica Coombs and then returns to Woodland,” Gorman said. “He has an obligation as a father to care about and seek to help his child. Frank Rees does none of that.”
Beede, meanwhile, questioned why it took more than two years for prosecutors to file charges against his client, suggesting it was Rees’ more recent drug arrest that triggered the involuntary manslaughter case because “it was time to save society from Mr. Rees.”
He conceded that while Rees comes from a dysfunctional family and engages in “deplorable conduct … there is no way to anticipate this would lead to something so overwhelmingly drastic.”
Rather, Beede said, it was Green who took the “very conscious” steps of driving to Knights Landing with her baby to catch Rees cheating on her, then swimming with Justice across the slough and staying there when she couldn’t find Rees.
“These are decisions that a jealous, outraged, emotional woman made on her own,” Beede said, calling Rees’ alleged liability a “remarkable stretch of logic.”
“The evidence, hard as it is to listen to, shows Mr. Rees really wasn’t involved with this child at all,” he said.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene