Sexual assault charge dismissed after judge rules former YDC employee incompetent

Sexual assault charges against Frank Davis, one of 11 former state employees charged with alleged child abuse in state juvenile detention centers, were dismissed Tuesday after a judge ruled he was incompetent to stand trial.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said the state had found no basis to challenge the ruling, which came after an evaluation of Davis by the Office of the Forensic Examiner.

Davis’ attorneys first raised the issue of competency in his case in September 2022. A competency assessment report was submitted in March 2024. According to a court spokesman, documents related to Davis’ competency are under seal.

The dismissal of the charges ends the criminal case against the 82-year-old Davis and marks the first criminal case by the Attorney General’s YDC Task Force to reach a conclusion.

Lawyers representing Frank Davis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Davis worked at the former Youth Development Center (YDC) in Manchester from at least the 1970s to the 1990s. He was charged with five counts of sexual assault and one count of aggravated sexual assault. The indictment involved allegations made in 1996 and 1997 by two former YDC residents.

One of those former residents is David Meehan, who last week prevailed in his civil lawsuit against the state for allowing Davis and other former YDC employees to mistreat him. The jury found the state liable for the abuse and awarded Meehan $38 million. However, it remains unclear whether Meehan will actually receive the full amount.

“The state of New Hampshire allowed Frank Davis to rape and abuse countless children, including David Meehan, over many decades at the YDC,” one of Meehan’s lawyers, David Vicinanzo, said in a statement to NHPR. “It is unfortunate that he will not receive the justice he so richly deserves.”

Meehan is far from the only former YDC resident to call Davis a perpetrator. At least 108 people who have filed lawsuits against the state over alleged abuse at YDC name Davis as one of their abusers — the most of any former YDC employee, according to an NHPR analysis of more than a thousand civil lawsuits filed since 2020. The allegations against Davis in the lawsuits from 1972 to 1999.

Davis was arrested on April 7, 2021 by state police as part of a special task force established by then-Attorney General Gordon McDonald in 2020 to investigate allegations of abuse at the state juvenile detention center.

The task force made a total of 11 arrests, the most recent being announced on April 21, 2021. By March 2024, Assistant Attorney General Meghan Hagaman was reported to have told a judge that the task force was no longer primarily focused on investigating abuse, but was instead preparing for the upcoming criminal proceedings.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to confirm that a judge has found Frank Davis unfit to stand trial and to include comment from the state’s attorney general’s office.