EVERETT — A Port Townsend man twice acquitted of child sex crimes was convicted Wednesday of molesting a 3-year-old girl during a Thanksgiving dinner in 2013 in Stanwood.
A Snohomish County jury needed just 90 minutes to reach a guilty verdict after a week-long trial that included testimony from the victim, now 6.
Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Laura Twitchell retried the case following a mistrial in November. Those jurors couldn’t reach a verdict after a couple of days of deliberations.
Joshua David Larson, 41, was led off in handcuffs Wednesday afternoon. He faces up to 5?1/2 years in prison when he’s sentenced in March. Once he serves his time, Larson will have to convince the state’s Indeterminate Sentence Review Board that he is fit to be released.
He will be required to register as a sex offender.
Larson denied touching the girl’s genitals. He testified that his hand brushed her clothed buttocks as he lifted her to take a toy away. Larson told detectives the girl may have made up the story because that’s what her parents wanted to hear.
Larson plans to appeal his conviction, his lawyer said.
Over the years four other girls have accused Larson of molesting them. He’s been acquitted twice at trials.
Larson remains charged in Jefferson County with molesting a 7-year-old girl in 2013. He is accused of sexually assaulting the girl while she visited his then-5-year-old son at the family’s Port Townsend home.
That girl and two others, who accused Larson of sexually abusing them, were allowed to testify in the Snohomish County trial.
Superior Court Judge Anita Farris permitted their testimony for limited purposes, specifically to refute the defendant’s claims that the touching was accidental. Twitchell pressed to get the testimony in front of jurors to prove that Larson used a common plan in each incident and that the touching was for his sexual gratification.
Jurors were told that Larson was acquitted in a case involving one of the girls.
The admissability of the other girls’ testimony is expected to be at the heart of Larson’s appeal.
The defendant was 24 when he was charged with child molestation after a 5-year-old girl reported that he abused her. A King County jury acquitted him at the 1998 trial.
During the investigation into that case, Bothell police heard from another young woman who reported that Larson abused her in 1994, when she was 8. He wasn’t charged in connection with those allegations.
In March, a Clallam County jury concluded that Larson wasn’t guilty of molesting a 9-year-old girl in 2014 at a public pool in Sequim. The girl reported that Larson touched her while she was playing in the pool.
That allegation came just two months after Larson was arrested for the Snohomish County incident. He’d been released from the Everett jail without having to post bail.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @dianahefley.
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