A Montana man who had been living with a teenager who disappeared from her home in Arizona years earlier was sentenced to decades in a prison for possession of child sex abuse material, authorities said Tuesday. Montana District Judge Kaydee Snipes Ruiz in Hill County sentenced Edmund Davis to 100 years at the state penitentiary with 50 years suspended. He will be eligible for parole in 25 years, Attorney General Austin Knudsen said.
Davis pleaded guilty last year after authorities found the illicit material on his cellphone while investigating the case of Alicia Navarro, who vanished from her home in 2019, just days before her 15th birthday. She left a note behind when she disappeared, sparking a massive search that included the FBI. Navarro had been living with Davis for at least a year when she walked into the Havre, Montana, police station in July 2023 and asked to be removed from the missing persons list.
Authorities have never said whether Davis was a suspect in Navarro’s disappearance. When she showed up at the police station she was 18 and legally an adult. While investigating the circumstances that led Navarro to be in Havre — nearly 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometers) from her childhood home in Glendale, Arizona — law enforcement officers obtained warrants to search Davis' house. As officers arrived, they saw Davis throwing the phone in the trash and a forensics team later found the sex abuse images on the device, court records said. Some images involved infants and toddlers and others were computer generated content showing children being sexualized, according to court records.
Davis and Navarro moved out of the Havre apartment days after the news media reported their location, neighbors told The Associated Press. Davis was charged in October 2023 over the illegal material on his phone. Davis' attorney, Public Defender Casey Moore, did not immediately respond to telephone and email messages seeking comment. Over the years, Navarro’s mother, Jessica Nuñez, said her daughter may have been lured away by someone she met online. A private investigator who has worked with Nuñez did not immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.
