WOODLAND — A day away from facing a jury on charges stemming from the 2015 death of his infant son, Frank Rees decided to cut his losses, making a plea agreement Tuesday that calls for a six-year prison term.
The unexpected resolution followed a damaging pretrial ruling in which Yolo Superior Court Judge Paul Richardson told prosecutors Ryan Couzens and Rob Gorman they could present evidence that Rees’ current girlfriend gave birth earlier this year to an infant who tested positive for methamphetamine — just as baby Justice Rees had two years before.
In other words, history was repeating itself.
“We know how that movie ends, and it ends in possibly the death of another child,” Gorman said.
Justice died of exposure at 19 days old after his mother, Samantha Green, swam with him across a frigid Knights Landing slough and kept him outdoors overnight while under the influence of methamphetamine — the culmination of a weekend-long drug binge that prosecutors say Rees facilitated, despite warnings from child welfare workers to seek treatment for the couple’s addictions.
Richardson’s ruling slammed the brakes on Tuesday’s planned jury-selection proceedings and prompted a lengthy private meeting between Rees and his defense attorney, Rod Beede, who later emerged with a signed plea form.
In it, Rees agreed to plead no contest to three of the charges against him: involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment and furnishing methamphetamine to Green.
“His reason for doing this is that he feels great sadness and remorse for the death of his son Justice, and he wanted to spare his family the drama and the testimony that would have impacted them and the community,” Beede said after court resumed.
“Mr. Rees, is this what you’re willing to do at this point?” Richardson asked Rees before taking his plea.
“Yes, your honor,” Rees replied, wiping at his eyes with a tissue as he entered no-contest pleas to each of the three felony counts.
Two other charges, eavesdropping and furnishing drugs to another woman, were dismissed in exchange for the plea, as was a separate case in which he was charged with unlawfully possessing ammunition.
Rees will be sentenced on Dec. 5 to six years in prison, three years shy of the nine-year maximum he faced if convicted of all charges.
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The sentencing hearing will mark the end of a nearly three-year saga that began on Feb. 23, 2015, when a disheveled, hysterical Samantha Green surfaced alone on a levee road near Ridge Cut Slough in Knights Landing, screaming that she and her baby had been kidnapped and she was sexually assaulted.
Searchers found Justice’s body amid the slough bank’s thickets the following day, clad only in a gray cotton onesie embossed with the words,“Is it legal to carry guns this big?”
Green later recanted the kidnapping and assault claims, admitting to investigators she had used methamphetamine and marijuana throughout her pregnancy and in the days leading up to Justice’s death. She also acknowledged going to Knights Landing in search of Rees, whom she suspected of infidelity.
Though Green alleged that Rees gave her large doses of meth and played mind games that put her in a drug-induced psychosis that day, a jury convicted her last year of second-degree murder, finding that she made a conscious decision to go to the slough and stay there.
Green, 25, is serving a sentence of 15 years to life in the Chowchilla state prison but currently is housed at the Yolo County Jail, one of numerous witnesses that prosecutors had planned to call during Rees’ three-week trial.
She declined an interview request from The Davis Enterprise seeking her reaction to her former fiancé’s plea deal.
The case appeared closed until February of this year, when Yolo County sheriff’s deputies serving civil papers on Rees at his Woodland home encountered Rees and his girlfriend, who was about seven months pregnant at the time. Both had methamphetamine in their pockets, and the girlfriend soon gave birth to a premature, drug-positive baby girl.
Prosecutors filed Rees’ current charges two weeks later, declining to discuss the reason for the lengthy delay between his and Green’s prosecutions.
Until Tuesday, that is, when District Attorney Jeff Reisig disclosed at a news conference that, while Rees was under investigation all along, “it was the evidence we received that Frank Rees was providing methamphetamine to a new woman who was pregnant that triggered our decision to file.”
“We simply could not wait any longer,” Reisig said. “It was the right decision, and today, baby Justice can hopefully rest in peace.”
Couzens and Gorman argued at Rees’ preliminary hearing earlier this year that although he may not have intentionally caused Justice’s death, he triggered a fatal chain of events by knowingly allowing a meth-addled Green to care for their newborn son.
Beede, meanwhile, characterized his client — who had four other children with another woman before Justice — as a disinterested, uninvolved father who, despite his “deplorable conduct,” had no way of anticipating Green would act so drastically.
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Watching Rees enter his no-contest pleas in the courtroom Tuesday was Randy Green, Samantha Green’s father, who shook his head in disgust as the plea deal went down.
Since Rees’ arrest eight months ago, Randy Green has questioned why prosecutors didn’t seek a murder charge against him like they did for his daughter, whose conviction is under appeal.
“They didn’t offer her anything. They went after her gung-ho,” said Green, who also believes Rees’ parents, with whom Rees and Samantha Green lived before and during Justice’s brief life, bear some responsibility for the couple’s continued drug use.
“They’re just as guilty. They allowed this to happen,” added Green, who also faults social workers for failing to remove Justice from his parents’ custody. “I can’t get any closure until everybody involved in the death of my grandson is held accountable.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene