A 59-year-old man is accused in federal court of taking a 9-year-old girl and her younger sister from Alaska to Oregon and sexually assaulting the older girl in hotels and a Pendleton home he later shared with her mother, according to court records.
Federal authorities filed the charges after the Umatilla County district attorney bungled the prosecution of Steven Lee Fox in state court, according to Rachel L. Rothberg, a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s child exploitation section.
The district attorney’s office allowed the dismissal in 2022 of sexual abuse charges it had filed against Fox two years earlier “purportedly because the minor girls could not be located,” according to court records.
But the girls were in foster care out of state, the records said.
When it became clear the girls were in Alaska custody and willing to testify against Fox, the “DA’s office declined to reopen the case,” Rothberg said in a detention memo.
As a result, the FBI in Alaska initiated an investigation in March 2023, had the case file against Fox transferred from Oregon to Alaska and reinterviewed the two sisters.
Umatilla County District Attorney Daniel R. Primus on Friday, March 21, said the case became more difficult as time passed. “This was a difficult and complex case at the time we made the charging decision. It only became more complicated when we were unable to locate the victims,” he said. The charges were filed during the pandemic, and Fox remained in custody but when a trial was scheduled, the victims could not be found, he said.
“We knew they had gone to Alaska but we were not aware they were placed in foster care,” Primus said.
Fox, who has a lengthy criminal history in Oregon and was barred from being around children as part of his parole conditions, had first met the girls after moving to Alaska in 2019 and meeting their mother, claiming he was a “long-lost uncle,” according to Rothberg.
The mother, who suffered from substance abuse, didn’t ask many questions, according to Rothberg.
Fox “cozied up” to the two girls in Anchorage, “knowing full well that their absent and neglectful mother would not be able to protect them,” Rothberg said in the memo.
“He deliberately separated these minors from their mother and transported them thousands of miles away, where he was able to sexually assault his 9-year-old minor victim.”
In January 2020, Fox flew with the two girls alone from Anchorage to Seattle and then drove them to Pendleton, staying with them at Motel 6s and casinos, according to Rothberg. He began sexually assaulting the 9-year-old girl, dyed both girls’ hair and bought them matching clothes, she said.
On Feb. 4, 2020, Oregon State Police stopped Fox for speeding and found the two girls with him in the car. Fox’s account of what they were doing “did not make much sense,” but police “did not believe they could do anything” because Fox’s parole had expired, Rothberg’s memo said.
The girls’ mother joined her daughters and Fox in Oregon by mid-February 2020 and stayed with them in Portland. It was there that the 9-year-old disclosed that “Uncle Steven” had made the girls watch an inappropriate movie, though he claimed he put it on accidentally, Rothberg said.
Fox bought a house in Pendleton and the three moved in together. He continued to sexually abuse the 9-year-old and threatened to harm her younger sister and mother and kick them out of the house if she talked, according to the memo.
On April 11, 2020, the girls’ mother reported to Pendleton police that Fox had taken her 9-year-old daughter and her car without permission, leading to his arrest on allegations of kidnapping and unauthorized use of a vehicle.
Police set up a forensic child abuse interview with the 9-year-old, who disclosed the sexual abuse, the memo said.
Additional charges of first-degree sexual abuse and sodomy were filed against Fox by the Umatilla County District Attorney’s Office, but the case sat for two years before it was dismissed in July 2022, Rothberg said.
The FBI in Anchorage took over the case and obtained an indictment against Fox this month, charging him with transportation of a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
But FBI agents were unable to locate Fox for several months because he had sold his home in Pendleton and was moving frequently. He was recently arrested at a Portland apartment but had bounced around apartments, homes and motels in Oregon and Alaska, according to Rothberg.
He appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie F. Beckerman Friday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Portland.
He has previous convictions for unauthorized use of a vehicle, arson, theft, possession of a weapon, burglary, robbery and escape. Most of his victims were elderly people he targeted while pretending to be a long-lost relative, according to court records.
He was investigated in 1993 in Portland in the sexual assault of a person who suffered from cerebral palsy, but rape and sodomy charges against him were dismissed for unknown reasons, according to the federal memo.
When Fox was released from prison in another case in 2016, he was ordered to undergo a sex offender evaluation and wasn’t allowed around children due to his “sexualized behavior” while he had been in prison, Rothberg said. Her memo didn’t say what the behavior was.
He also was the subject of an unrelated sexual abuse allegation made to Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office and the Oregon Department of Human Services in 2019, suspected of touching a 3-year-old girl, according to federal records.
That case did not result in an arrest and was closed, partly because the assigned sheriff’s deputy “questioned the mother’s motives for reporting,” Rothberg’s memo said.
Fox, represented by an assistant federal public defender in federal court Friday, did not contest his continued detention. He is to be taken by U.S. Marshals to Anchorage to face prosecution in the District of Alaska.