Sexual assault charges against Frank Davis, one of 11 former state employees criminally charged over alleged child abuse at state-run youth detention facilities, were dismissed on Tuesday after a judge ruled he is not competent to stand trial.
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said the state found no basis on which 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 report from a competency evaluation was filed in March 2024. According to a court spokesperson, documents related to Davis' competency are under seal.
The dismissal of the charges brings an end to the criminal case against Davis, who is 82, and marks the first criminal case from the Attorney General’s YDC Task Force to reach a conclusion.
Attorneys 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 through the 1990s. He was charged with five counts of sexual assault and one count of aggravated felonious sexual assault. The charges involved allegations by two former YDC residents in 1996 and 1997.
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 staff to abuse him. The jury found the state liable for the abuse and awarded Meehan $38 million, though whether Meehan will actually receive the full amount remains unclear.
“The state of New Hampshire allowed Frank Davis to rape and abuse countless children, including David Meehan, over many decades at the YDC,” said one of Meehan’s attorneys, David Vicinanzo, in a statement to NHPR. “It’s unfortunate that he will not receive the justice he so richly deserves.”
Meehan is far from the only former YDC resident to name Davis as an abuser. At least 108 people who filed lawsuits against the state over alleged abuse at YDC name Davis as one of their abusers — the most of any former YDC staff, according to an analysis by NHPR of more than one thousand civil complaints filed since 2020. The allegations against Davis in the lawsuits span from 1972 to 1999.
Davis was arrested by state police on April 7, 2021 as part of a special task force established by then-Attorney General Gordon McDonald in 2020 to investigate claims of abuse at the state-run youth detention facility.
The task force made a total of 11 arrests, the last being announced on April 21, 2021. By March of 2024, Assistant Attorney General Meghan Hagaman reportedly told a judge the task force is no longer primarily focused on investigating abuse and is instead preparing for the upcoming criminal trials.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to confirm that a judge ruled Frank Davis not competent to stand trial, and to include comment from the state attorney general’s office.
