A man accused of molesting a Tracy girl in 1996 pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of child molestation.

Kevin Paul Rose, 30, faces 25 years to life in prison for the two charges, which will most likely run concurrently. He will be sentenced May 7.

Deputy District Attorney Xapuri Villapurda told Judge Duane Martin that these are enhanced sentences because Rose broke into a house to molest a 4-year-old girl and kidnapped the same girl a week later and molested her at a church across the street from her house in northern Tracy.

They were just two incidents in a string of molestations and attempted molestations on the northern end of town in the fall of 1996. Police investigated cases in which a man had reportedly molested three different girls and at least two other cases in which a man tried to lure young girls toward him.

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Kevin Paul Rose 

Officer Steve Bailey, who investigated the incidents, noted that police believed the crimes were connected because they were in the same general area and the victims were similar in age and appearance.

Villapurda said it is unusual to have a defendant plead guilty to such a long prison sentence, especially because he has no other serious felony convictions on his record.

“I’m happy for the victims,” she said. “They’ve waited 10 years for closure. I’m happy they didn’t have to take the stand.”

Before accepting Rose’s guilty plea, Martin made sure he understood that he would waive his right to a jury trial. The guilty plea also comes before the court had a preliminary hearing, where police and prosecutors would have described the evidence against Rose.

Rose’s attorney, Vangie Eidsvik-Garza, said it was a tough decision to accept the plea deal, but she said Rose would have faced more than 100 years in prison had he been convicted of all the filed charges.

While she wouldn’t discuss her conversations with her client, Eidsvik-Garza pointed out that there is nothing in police reports that show that Rose ever confessed to the crimes.

In all, he faced six child molestation charges, each with enhancements. He also faced three separate charges of burglary and a charge of kidnapping for sexual purposes.

The two charges to which Rose pled guilty stem from a Sept. 23, 1996, incident in which a man in northern Tracy told police that someone had broken into his girlfriend’s house and molested her 4-year-old daughter. The same person reportedly came back on Oct. 2, 1996, and took the girl across the street to a church and molested her again.

Police found semen samples on the girls’ clothes after the first incident and on the ground at the church after the second incident. DNA profiles showed that those samples came from the same man.

Police arrested a man at the time who confessed to the crime, according to Bailey. They later ruled the man out as a suspect after DNA samples from the crime scenes failed to match the man’s DNA.

“After the first guy who was arrested was eliminated, we had no suspects,” Bailey said.

Villapurda told the judge that Rose became the primary suspect last year after a profile of his DNA sample, on file with a state Department of Justice crime lab, matched the DNA samples from the Tracy case.

Detective Octavio Lopez, who took over the investigation last year, said police occasionally run DNA profiles from local cases through the state labs to see if any matches come up.

Villapurda said jail officials in Marin County took DNA samples from Rose’s saliva and blood after he was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor child molestation in San Rafael in late 2001. He served a six-month jail sentence in that case.

After Rose was arrested in Sacramento on Dec. 21, 2006, Tracy police took another blood sample, which matched the evidence from the 1996 case, Lopez said.

To reach reporter Bob Brownne, call 830-4227 or e-mail brownne@tracypress.com.