Sex Trafficker

When David Frodsham was a top civilian commander at a US air base in Afghanistan, he “jokingly” requested access to YouPorn, a video-sharing pornographic website, from an IT worker.

Before he was ordered home after the military confirmed many complaints of sexual harassment, Frodsham told one woman that he recruited her because he “wanted to be surrounded by lovely ladies” and called others “honey,” “baby,” and “cougar.”

According to a U.S. Army inquiry file acquired by The Associated Press, one commanding officer recommended that the Army order Frodsham to leave his post at Bagram Airfield and return to Fort Huachuca, a major Army site in Arizona, and pursue disciplinary actions at his home station.

Frodsham rejoined the Network Enterprise Technology Command, the Army’s information technology service provider, in fall 2015, where he had previously served as director of people for a global command of 15,000 troops and civilians, according to his Army resume.

He was arrested in Arizona in the spring of the following year for leading a child sex abuse network that included an Army sergeant who was publishing child pornography on the internet. One of Frodsham’s adopted sons was among the victims.

In 2016, Frodsham pled guilty to sex abuse charges and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. However, records obtained by the Associated Press show that the US Army and the state of Arizona missed or ignored countless red signals over a decade, allowing Frodsham to allegedly mistreat his adoptive son and other children for years while jeopardizing national security.

Despite nearly 20 reports and attempted complaints of abuse, neglect, maltreatment, and license breaches, the state allowed Frodsham and his wife, Barbara, to foster, adopt, and keep custody of their many children. Meanwhile, the Army offered Frodsham crucial jobs and security clearances at a time when his unlawful sexual habits made him vulnerable to blackmail.

Because of his function and location, he would have been an apparent target for foreign intelligence services, according to Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director of counterintelligence. “One of the more sensitive installations in the continental United States is Fort Huachuca.” People who are concerned about their safety should not be present.” According to its website, Fort Huachuca is home to the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, in addition to NETCOM, where Frodsham worked.

Frodsham was a program manager for NETCOM before being arrested on child sex abuse allegations, according to Fort Huachuca public relations personnel. They wouldn’t disclose if Frodsham was penalized after his return from Afghanistan or if the Army ever deemed him a security concern.

For their roles in the child sex abuse ring, Frodsham, retired Sgt. Randall Bischak, and a third man not linked with the Army are all serving jail sentences. However, the inquiry is still ongoing since Sierra Vista police suspect other guys were involved.

Two of Frodsham’s adopted boys have filed separate lawsuits against the state for licensing David and Barbara Frodsham as foster parents in a household where they claim they were physically and sexually abused throughout their lives.

Attorney Lynne Cadigan, who represents all three, said a third adoptive son is scheduled to bring suit in Arizona state court in Cochise County on Tuesday. Trever Frodsham, 19, claims that case workers disregarded or overlooked several signals that David and Barbara Frodsham were unfit parents in his current complaint. One of the Frodshams’ biological daughters filed a sex abuse complaint with local police in 2002 against an older biological sibling, and David and Barbara Frodsham were both victims of child sex abuse.

Trever’s claims are similar to those made in a lawsuit filed by his older biological brother, Ryan Frodsham, and a lawsuit filed by Neal Taylor, both of whom were adopted into the Frodsham family.

Ryan Frodsham told the Associated Press that he was sexually abused by his adoptive father when he was 9 or 10 years old, and that the abuse lasted into his teens, when David Frodsham began giving his son’s sexual services to other men. “Makes me throw up thinking about it,” Ryan commented.

In the lawsuit filed, Ryan Frodsham said the state was made aware that David and Barbara Frodsham were physically abusing their children “by slapping them in the face, pinching them, hitting them with a wooden spoon, putting hot sauce in their mouths, pulling them by the hair, bending their fingers back to inflict pain, forcing them to hold cans with their arms extended for long periods time,” and refusing to let them use the bathroom unless the door remained open. In an interview with the Associated Press, Ryan said that Barbara never sexually abused him, but that she did walk into the room where David was abusing him at least twice.

He stated, “She knew what was going on.”

Investigators with the Department of Child Safety and case workers with Catholic Community Services, which subcontracts foster and adoption work from the state, failed to effectively follow up on 19 complaints and attempted complaints regarding the Frodsham home over a decade, according to the adopted sons’ two lawsuits and related legal filings.

The complaints started when the Frodshams applied for their foster care license in 2002 and continued until 2015, when David Frodsham was charged with disorderly conduct and driving drunk with children in his car, prompting the state to suspend their license indefinitely and remove all foster children from their home, though the charges were later dismissed.

Frodsham was dispatched to Afghanistan five months later, but after just four months, he was ordered back to Arizona.

REPORTS WERE HEARD BY DEAF EARS

According to the claims, the Frodshams’ adopted children attempted but failed to disclose their own physical and sexual abuse.

For example, according to Neal Taylor’s lawsuit, he attempted to report David Frodsham sexually abusing him in two phone conversations to his case manager, both made from school.

According to Neal’s lawsuit, the case manager reported the call to his adoptive mother, who “interrogated” him and “proceeded to discipline” him the first time. The case manager refused to meet with him the second time unless he told him the reason for his call over the phone, because a private meeting would have required him to drive 90 minutes from Tucson to Sierra Vista.

According to Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit and accompanying legal files, when he was 12 years old and had ran away from home, he reported Barbara Frodsham’s alleged physical abuse to Sierra Vista police. The incident was reported to the state Department of Child Safety, and police recorded multiple bruises before returning him to Barbara Frodsham. Despite the images and a police complaint, Ryan’s allegations were determined to be “unsubstantiated” by a case worker who met with him five weeks later.

Darren DaRonco, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Child Safety, declined to answer specific questions regarding the litigation. Instead, he sent an email describing the state’s screening procedures for potential foster and adoptive parents. “Despite all of these safeguards, people are sometimes able to avoid detection,” DaRonco said, “especially if a person has no prior criminal or child abuse history.”

Despite this, both David and Barbara Frodsham have stated that they were abused as children.

Barbara Frodsham stated in their written application to become foster parents that neither she nor her husband had been sexually abused. However, in recent pretrial testimony for Ryan Frodsham’s case, she stated that if she had been asked by a state investigator as part of the licensure process, she would have exposed her abuse.

Following his guilty plea, David Frodsham told a probation officer that he had been abused as a youth.

Many child welfare specialists believe that persons who have been sexually abused as a child are more prone to abuse children in their own homes and should be questioned before being allowed to offer foster care.

Arizona’s case workers “did not know how to interview and, therefore, they didn’t get candid answers from the Frodshams,” Kathleen Faller said. Faller is an expert witness retained in Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit. Faller also testified in advance of the trial that the state should not have granted the Frodshams a foster care license.

Barbara Frodsham, who divorced David after his guilty plea, did not return several phone calls from the Associated Press and did not answer specific questions left on her voice message. According to law enforcement documents, she was employed as a personnel expert at Fort Huachuca at the time of her husband’s incarceration. She is still employed at Fort Huachuca, according to a spokesman.

Attorneys for the state and the other defendants are attempting to have the lawsuits dismissed, citing a state provision that gives state employees immunity for mistakes or misjudgments made while on the job. The law does not grant immunity in cases of “gross negligence,” as the Frodsham brothers and Neal Taylor claim.

The state also claims that all concerns about the Frodsham children and home were handled properly.

SEX ABUSE RING FOR CHILDREN

The Frodsham case began with an undercover Homeland Security investigator loitering in a chat room frequented by child pornographers, as many child sex abuse investigations do. Using the Kik messaging app, the Philadelphia-based agent came across “Pup Brass,” who was posting films and images classified “pedopicsandvidd.”

Kik provides some anonymity to its users, but it does store IP addresses, which are used to identify a device’s internet connection and can be used to identify the device’s owner. According to a Sierra Vista police probable cause statement, federal and local law enforcement investigators quickly concluded that “Pup Brass” was Sgt. Randall Bischak based on the IP address and other information, including some gathered from social media accounts.

Bischak confessed to having intercourse with a 59-year-old man he called “Dave” and his adolescent son when they raided his home, seizing laptops, cell phones, tablets, and CDs containing child pornography. In at least one case, Bischak had covertly videotaped the encounter. He also admitted to investigators that he and Frodsham talked about having sex with little children, and that Frodsham had provided him with at least one of the “little ones.”

Thomas Ransford, a Sierra Vista police officer who specializes in child sex abuse investigations, was no stranger to Frodsham. He was a military police officer at Fort Huachuca in the mid-2000s, when Frodsham was the head of Training, Plans, Mobilization, and Security. “So, I knew him. I was familiar with him, attended meetings with him,” Ransford recalled. He was also aware that Frodsham’s foster children were perpetually in trouble.

Frodsham initially denied everything when Ransford questioned him. “He was haughty, as if he thought he was the smartest guy in the room,” Ransford said. Then Ransford showed Frodsham the film Bischak had covertly recorded of himself having three-way sex with Frodsham and his adopted son, Ryan, and Frodsham started to admit his wrongdoings.

Ryan Frodsham likewise denied his father had abused him at first. “Ryan appeared very defensive of his father and did not want to implicate him in any misconduct,” Ransford wrote in a probable cause statement.

Ryan began to open up after Ransford showed him an incriminating photograph retrieved from Bischak’s cell phone. Ryan identified others he claimed were part of his father’s child sex abuse network over the course of several months, according to Ransford, fueling the ongoing inquiry.

“There’s others we’re aware of,” Ransford stated. “It’s open.”

The Frodsham child sex abuse ring is one of several sex abuse incidents that have surfaced in Cochise County, Arizona, in recent years, including some involving US Border Patrol employees, two of whom worked at the Naco Border Crossing. — John Daly III is one among them. Authorities detained the recently retired Border Patrol agent a year ago after DNA evidence led them to suspect him in at least eight rapes and to wonder if he was the infamous “East Valley rapist” who frightened women outside of Phoenix in the 1990s. Multiple counts of sexual assault and kidnapping have been filed against him by prosecutors in Maricopa and Cochise counties. Daly has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is being jailed without bail.

Dana Thornhill is a writer. Thornhill was sentenced to 40 years in jail a year ago after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting his two children for years. Thornhill was arrested after a standoff with police in which he barricaded himself inside a nearby church. Thornhill was the chaplain at the Naco Border Crossing at the time.

Paul Adams is an author. Adams was charged in 2017 with raping his two daughters, one of whom was just 6 weeks old at the time, as well as recording and posting recordings of the sexual assaults on the Internet. Adams was also stationed at the Naco Border Crossing before committing suicide before going on trial.

According to Ransford, the cluster of instances can be ascribed to efficient police work and effective prosecution, which encourage victims and others to disclose child sex abuse. “People report because they know something’s going to be done about it,” he explained.

Cadigan, the attorney for the Frodsham brothers and Neal Taylor, wonders if child sex abuse is on the upswing in southern Arizona. “Law enforcement has been very effective, and I appreciate their efforts, but I’ve been taking these cases for 30 years and I’ve never been so busy,” she stated.

A DEPARTMENT WITH A SCANDALOUS HISTORY

The Frodsham brothers and Neal Taylor allegedly suffered physical and sexual abuse at a period when Arizona’s child welfare system was mired in controversy. Officials revealed in 2013 that the Department of Protective Services, as it was then known, had a backlog of almost 6,500 abuse and neglect allegations it had never examined.

After learning of the scandal, then-Gov. Jan Brewer dissolved the department and established the Department of Child Safety as a Cabinet-level institution. “It is evident that our child welfare system is broken, impeded by years of operational failures,” said Brewer.

Deep funding cuts to family support services were at the heart of the controversy, resulting in a spike in abuse and neglect allegations and “unmanageable workloads, personnel turnover, and the insufficient experience of some CPS supervisors and newly hired investigators,” according to an auditor general’s report.

According to a 2014 report prepared for the Arizona Legislature, the growth in workloads in Arizona for the decade ending in 2012 was more than in any other state except one. It also revealed that between 2009 and 2012, the response time for abuse and neglect allegations increased from 63 to nearly 250 hours.

The state is attempting to keep any reference of the department’s troublesome background out of its defense against Ryan Frodsham’s lawsuit. In a pretrial motion, the state stated, “There is no evidence that the types of difficulties that led to the collapse of CPS have any relevance to or impact on his case.”

However, David and Barbara Frodsham were approved as foster parents in 2002, at the start of the department’s most difficult time, and formally adopted the three men who were going to court a decade later, just before the system crashed. “The jury is entitled to the full picture,” lawyers for Ryan Frodsham stated.

This piece was written by Staff Writer on April 2, 2022. It originally appeared in DrewBerquist.com and is used by permission.

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