PILOT — David Wayne Kingrea wants to be able to pick up his disabled son from school.
He wants to be able to better advocate for his son’s care, to feel that he can approach organizations that help children with rare disabilities. He wants to have a better chance of being hired for a job.
He wants to remove his name from the Virginia Sex Offender Registry.
And he wants to overturn a 2014 jury verdict that found him guilty of molesting his then-girlfriend’s son.
All of this may be coming closer with a recent Virginia Court of Appeals order. On Jan. 14, the state appeals court said that a Montgomery County judge must take a new look at the testimony of Kingrea’s accuser — now a grown man who filed an affidavit in 2020 saying he lied in order to convict Kingrea. Fred Kellerman, a Christiansburg attorney who is representing Kingrea, said that he could not recall a similar decision in 30 years of legal practice.
Kingrea, 48, said Sunday that the appeals court ruling still was settling in. A date has not been scheduled for a hearing to examine the accuser’s testimony. And after that, the case will go back to the appeals court for a decision about Kingrea’s guilt or innocence.
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But after years of hoping, the possibility that Kingrea would be exonerated seemed far closer.
“I’m happy,” Kingrea said. “I don’t know how to put it into words. It’s been a long journey. … It’s such a journey of emotions.”
‘Try to right my wrong’
According to a review carried out last year by the Virginia Attorney General’s office, the allegations against Kingrea surfaced several years after his breakup with his accuser’s mother.
The accuser, Shawn Douglas Smith, now 23, told state attorneys that in 2008, he, his younger brother, and his mother lived with Kingrea in Kingrea’s single-wide mobile home along Pilot Road. It was the home where Kingrea grew up and where he still lives.
Both Kingrea and Smith’s mother would eventually testify that the relationship ended badly, amid drug use and theft. Smith’s mother was convicted in 2009 of fraud for using a credit card that belonged to Kingrea’s mother.
In 2011, Smith said to state attorneys, he told a counselor that when they had lived together, Kingrea several times touched Smith’s genitals and made him touch Kingrea’s.
In March 2014, a teenage Smith repeated those accusations as the primary witness during Kingrea’s trial, which ended with a jury finding Kingrea guilty of taking indecent liberties with a child over whom he had a supervisory role.
Four counts of sodomy were dropped before the trial began and another count of indecent liberties was thrown out by the judge.
“I was looking at 80 years to begin with, and I still didn’t take no pleas,” Kingrea recalled. “I was standing on the truth.”
Stoic as jurors announced his conviction, Kingrea broke into tears during his trial’s sentencing phase.
“I’m truly innocent. I did not do this. It’s a hard pill to swallow that I’ve been convicted of something I did not do,” Kingrea told the jury.
In August 2014, a judge affirmed jurors’ sentencing recommendation and sent Kingrea to jail for 12 months.
In an interview last month, Kingrea said that he stewed over what had happened for about five years, then eventually forgave Smith for what he’d told the jury. But Kingrea said he was stunned when, in the late summer of 2020, Smith’s grandmother arrived at the Pilot Road home to say that Smith was recanting.
Smith had also ended up behind bars, convicted in Radford of harming his own daughter.
Smith wrote a letter to Kingrea saying he was sorry. He explained that as a boy, he thought Kingrea’s household discipline was too harsh — and to get back at him, he made up the story of being sexually abused. Smith wrote that during his own incarceration, he had decided to “become a Godly man and a better man” and that he wanted to make amends.
“I know I can’t change what has already happened but I can change the future. I’m going to do whatever it takes to clear your name and try to right my wrong against you,” Smith wrote.
Smith said Kingrea was physically and verbally abusive toward him, but never sexually abusive. Kingrea, in his interview last month, agreed that he had been rough with Smith.
Smith worked with attorney Chris Tuck of Blacksburg and in October 2020, signed an affidavit stating that Kingrea had not sexually abused him.
Tuck said it was only the second such affidavit he’d prepared in nearly three decades as a lawyer.
“It took a lot of courage to do what he’s doing,” Tuck said of Smith. “He came forward.”
In the affidavit, Smith acknowledged that he was basically confessing to perjury, a felony. He said that from his own prison experience, “Now I understand what I put Mr. Kingrea through.”
“Mr. Kingrea was innocent,” Smith said in the affidavit. “… I wish to do the right and moral thing.”
In November 2021, when Smith was being held at the Lunenburg Correctional Center, state attorneys interviewed him and Smith again said that he testified falsely against Kingrea.
Smith added that after initially talking to investigators and testifying at Kingrea’s preliminary hearing, which was in 2012, he forgot the details of his story. But a prosecutor reminded him before he testified at the 2014 trial, the attorney general’s office review said.
Smith also told the state attorneys that he had allowed the false claims of abuse to be repeated as mitigating evidence at his own sentencing in January 2020. At that hearing, a Radford judge ordered that Smith, who had pleaded guilty to malicious wounding, cruelty, and child abuse or neglect, serve four years of a 20-year prison term.
Smith told the state attorneys that neither Kingrea nor anyone associated with him had contacted him or tried to convince him to take back his testimony.
After Kellerman received the affidavit in which Smith recanted, he filed a writ of actual innocence with the appeals court. The attorney general’s office responded, after its review, by asking the court to send the case back to Montgomery County to resolve the question of Smith’s credibility and truthfulness at trial.
In its order this month, the appeals court directed that a hearing be held in Montgomery County Circuit Court within the next three months. At the hearing, Smith is to again testify under oath, subject to cross examination, and the circuit judge is to make findings in three areas: whether Smith says his 2014 testimony was false and that Kingrea never touched him in a sexual manner; whether Kingrea or anyone else influenced Smith’s decision to recant; and whether Smith’s recantation was available to Kingrea’s attorney within 21 days of his final order of conviction.
The circuit court is to return its findings to the appeals judges within 30 days of the hearing, along with any findings about Smith’s “conscientiousness, intelligence and demeanor” that seem relevant, the appeals court order said.
‘A jail with no bars’
In 2012, as the case against him gathered steam, Kingrea married Michelle Barker, who he had met through church. In April 2015, Kingrea was furloughed from jail for a week to be present as Michelle gave birth to their son Dylan.
A few months after his second birthday, Dylan had a seizure. It would be the first in a horrifying progression that eventually led to the toddler having seizures almost continually, with more than 170 seizures in a 24-hour period, the Kingreas said. Each episode lasted usually just seconds, and involved Dylan seeming to lose track of what was happening around him.
Doctors eventually assigned a list of diagnoses, starting with a genetic mutation that causes a deficiency of the amino acid creatine that is needed by the brain and muscles. Other diagnoses include autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, which is a rare type of epilepsy, and more.
Now six years old, Dylan takes a host of medications. He is nonverbal and wears a helmet as he rides in a wheelchair. He likes watching videos, his father said.
He has attended programs at Montgomery County Public Schools for four years and is presently in the first grade, his parents said. At home, he spends much of his time in a net-enclosed safety bed that dominates the main room of the Kingreas’ home.
Dylan’s condition is “like a jail with no bars,” David Kingrea said.
Both Kingreas called their son a source of joy in their lives, even as they worry. With lots of help, the family meets Dylan’s basic needs. But “there’s so much more we could have done,” David Kingrea said.
Even matters as simple as replacing torn netting on Dylan’s safety bed become fraught attempts at duct-tape repairs, Kingrea said.
The family has a GoFundMe page under Dylan Kingrea’s name to try to raise money to add a “sensory room” to their home where Dylan could safely play. On Monday it was showing $615 raised toward an $8,000 goal.
Kingrea knows not to approach social service or charitable groups for help. There’s a long line for assistance and a convicted sex offender isn’t going to get it, he said.
The Kingreas said the sex abuse conviction held them back from having the money and resources that could help their son.
“It has consumed our marriage too,” Michelle Kingrea said.
She is a custodian for the public schools. David Kingrea worked at the regional recycling center before his arrest but has not held a job since being jailed. He said that soon after his release, he was hired at a restaurant — but was let go as soon as a manager learned that he was a sex offender. “We get kids here,” Kingrea remembered the manager saying.
Virginia law sets a number of restrictions for sex offenders, including a lifetime ban on “loitering” within 100 feet of a school or any children’s playground, athletic field, or day program. This means Kingrea cannot pick up or drop off his son at school, or go to programs there.
Kingrea said that he wants to do more for his son, in terms of his accommodations and care. He wonders if he could help raise money that could fund research into cures.
“It’s all about Dylan,” Kingrea said.
Until his case was reopened by the appeals court, these seemed distant dreams.
They may be nearer now.