Johnson man pleads guilty to sexually abusing family member

David Pai, 50, pleaded guilty Sept. 15 in Lamoille County Superior Court to two counts of sexual assault on someone under the age of 16 in his care, two counts of aggravated first-degree domestic assault and one count of domestic assault.

According to court documents, Pai was arrested by Stowe police in March 2020 after Det. Fred Whitcomb determined Pai had sexually abused two underaged members of his household in 2016 and 2017 when they lived in Stowe. Investigators say the abuse started before then, when the family lived in Iowa, with one victim saying Pai began inappropriately touching her when she was 9 years old, and he began sexually assaulting her when she was 11 or 12.

The Sept. 15 plea avoided a trial by jury. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dismissed two additional, more severe, sexual assault charges.

Judge Mary Morrissey ordered a pre-sentencing investigation and scheduled a sentencing hearing for Jan. 18. Pai faces a minimum of 15 years and maximum of life in prison.

During a deposition in April, one of the alleged victims — the oldest of four siblings — said Pai physically abused her and her siblings from an early age, pre-school in her case, doing things like punching them in the stomach and face, banging their heads against walls, biting their toes, making them smoke marijuana, tasing them with a stun gun, placing a shock collar around their neck and locking them in a dog cage for long periods of time.

One of the victims said this happened on a weekly basis when she was younger.

The victims told investigators, in depositions under oath, that the sexual assaults were also regular, both in the children’s home in Iowa and when the family moved to Vermont — first in Stowe and then in Johnson.

According to their depositions, the sexual assaults involved penetrative sex, both with fingers and his penis, forcing them to perform and receive oral sex and masturbation, and making them watch pornographic movies, starting at an early age.

The victims said Pai regularly threatened them to prevent them from telling police about the abuse, telling them that child protective services would split up the four siblings if they told police, or regularly threatening to kill himself if they reported the abuse. On more than one occasion he allegedly placed a weapon in the child’s hand and goaded her to kill him with it, according to court documents.

“The State’s theory is that the Defendant exerted control over his family for years, control which extended through nearly every area of their daily lives. The alleged sexual, physical, emotional and psychological abuse started in Iowa years before the charged offenses and persisted through and in the years after the family’s 2016 move to Vermont,” assistant state’s attorney Aliena Gerhard wrote in a motion filed with the court Sept. 6, in preparation for a jury trial that was canceled a week and a half later when Pai pleaded guilty.

Pai’s lawyer, public defender Kirk Williams, had previously argued, in an Aug. 31 motion, that the introduction of evidence of other crimes and “bad acts” was not admissible in court “to prove the character of a person in order to prove that he acted in conformity with it.”

Williams wrote, “The allegations are highly inflammatory and would prove confusing to the jury as to what it could consider and would be damning Mr. Pai for allegations about behaviors in another State which were never charged and in many cases the witnesses could not provide full details about in the depositions.”

Judge Mar Morrissey, in her response to the dueling motions, allowed prosecutors to include some of the evidence of Pai’s alleged abuse of the primary victim when the family lived in Iowa.

“[E]vidence of the other sexual acts between Defendant and (the victim), both in Vermont and in Iowa, is highly probative of the context of their relationship, as it demonstrates a pattern of sexual misconduct towards (the victim),” Morrissey wrote.