Clovis soccer coach spent a decade in jail for child sex crimes. And now he walks free

Eleven years ago, 52-year-old Dimitrios Kastis had it all – he had quit his job as an electrical engineer to live his dream as a youth soccer coach in Clovis, giving private lessons to children.

But his life turned upside down in July 2007, when Clovis police officers raided his home and arrested him on suspicion of committing lewd acts with three preteen girls. Police said that during the search of his home, officers found books with photos of nude girls and, on his computer, thousands of images of nude children being sexually abused by men.

Kastis ended up facing child molestation charges in Fresno Superior Court and federal child pornography charges in U.S. District Court in Fresno. But after spending about 10 years in the Fresno County Jail, Kastis has the rare distinction of prevailing in both his federal and state criminal cases – without having to stand trial.

On Sept. 7, Kastis was released from jail after federal Judge Dale A. Drozd ruled in U.S. District Court that the Clovis Police Department showed “a reckless disregard for the truth” in writing a warrant to search Kastis’ home and computer. Because federal prosecutors could no longer use the evidence from the search warrant, they made a motion to dismiss the case, which Drozd granted.

Two years earlier, in April 2016, Judge Jonathan Conklin dismissed Kastis’ child molestation case in Fresno Superior Court after prosecutors told the court they could not secure the attendance of an alleged victim to testify.

‘Innocent, and I can prove it’

Police said Kastis admitted that he shouldn’t have possessed the books with photos of nude children or taken “fun photos” of girls that focused on their faces and groin areas.

In an interview this month, Kastis, 63, said Clovis police officers lied about the evidence seized from his home and framed him on trumped-up charges. He also said the criminal justice system is filled with what he called “crooked” police, prosecutors and Superior Court judges and incompetent defense lawyers.

“I am innocent and I can prove it,” said Kastis, who had no prior criminal record before his arrest. “If they (judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers) were decent or honest or fair, they had opportunities to do something about the false allegations against me.”

Court records show Kastis, after his release from jail, has filed federal civil rights lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Justice, Fresno County District Attorney’s Office, Clovis Police Department and Clovis police detective Joe Alvarado, who wrote the affidavit that led to Kastis’ arrest.

The computer images of naked children “were not mine,” Kastis insisted, noting that the issue was never adjudicated because federal prosecutors were quick to dismiss the indictment against him, thus preventing him “from proving that police tampered with his computer.”

“If the pictures were solid evidence, the feds could have appealed Drozd’s ruling to suppress the evidence,” Kastis said.

The books of illicit photographs also weren’t his, he said. The books “could have been placed there by the same cops that forged police reports, lied to state and federal judges, accessed computer evidence without writing reports,” Kastis said.

“Clovis police is a criminally corrupt agency,” he said.

The Clovis Police Department declined to comment. A telephone call to an attorney representing the Clovis Police Department was not returned.

Steve Wright, an assistant Fresno County district attorney, denied any wrongdoing by prosecutors. He said the reason the case took so long is because Kastis changed lawyers frequently and ultimately defended himself.

Wright declined to comment further, saying the District Attorney’s Office has a policy against talking about criminal cases in which there is pending litigation.

Michele Beckwith, an executive assistant U.S. attorney in Sacramento, denied wrongdoing by federal prosecutors. “The suppression of evidence obtained through the state search warrant affected the U.S. Attorney’s Office ability proceed with the prosecution of Mr. Kastis,” she said in an email.

In her response, Beckwith noted that federal prosecutors believe there was sufficient basis for getting the warrant to search Kastis’ home in July 2007.

But Kastis said court documents prove Clovis police zeroed in on him with little evidence.

In his ruling, Drozd says “the limited information” provided by police perhaps established probable cause to arrest Kastis on a misdemeanor offense. Instead, prosecutors filed felony charges, resulting in Kastis being stuck behind bars for 10 years in lieu of $150,000 bail in Fresno Superior Court and no bail on the federal charges.

Greatest grief

Kastis’ time in jail has taken its toll. He is no longer a lean soccer coach; he’s chubby from lack of exercise and from eating cereal every day for breakfast and a bologna sandwich for lunch. He said beans, potato soup or pasta that was barely edible were often served as dinner.

He said he slept without a pillow for 10 years on a thin mattress and witnessed inmates fighting and dying in the jail.

He said he didn’t see the sun while incarcerated.

Most of all, he said, he missed his mother, Hope Kastis, who talked to him nearly every day while he was in jail. “My mother gave me hope,” he said of their telephone conversations from jail.

But in 2017, Hope Kastis suffered a stroke while living in New York. Kastis said he asked the federal court to release him temporarily in order to see his mother one last time, but the prosecution argued against it.

His mother died on June 7, 2017.

“I will never forgive him,” he said, blaming federal prosecutor David Gappa for opposing his release to attend his mother’s funeral.

“I never got to hold her hand and never got to say goodbye,” Kastis said, nearly crying.

Kastis said he grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, after his father died in Greece when he was around 8 years old. “That’s why I love my mother so much,” he said. “She was a single mother who worked very hard every day to raise me and my brother and sister.”

“That’s why it hurt so much when she died,” he said. “She was always there for us, but I couldn’t be with her in her final moments.”

Kastis said he spent three years in the Navy on a guided missile destroyer, the USS Sampson, before earning an honorable discharge in 1977. He then attended Youngstown State University, where he said he earned a degree in electrical engineering.

He move to California and worked in the Silicon Valley before moving to Clovis to be a youth soccer coach.

Clovis Unified spokeswoman Kelly Avants said Kastis was a soccer coach at Buchanan High between 2002 and 2005. Kastis said he coached the girls junior varsity team for two seasons and the varsity girls team for one season. Kastis said he also coached in Clovis youth soccer leagues and gave private lessons to both boys and girls.

In the affidavit to get a warrant to search Kastis’ home, police said the evidence showed Kastis “only coached young girls in soccer.” Kastis showed a Bee reporter a photograph of him with a group of boys holding soccer trophies. “The police lied to the judge, plain and simple,” he said.

Police raid his apartment

Kastis, a divorcee, was living at the Sierra Ridge Apartments on Fowler Avenue near Tollhouse Road when Clovis police raided his home on July 9, 2007. According to an affidavit by Alvarado, a woman reported in June 2007 that Kastis had kissed her 9-year-old daughter.

In the interview with The Bee, Kastis said that wasn’t true. He said a woman that he rejected as a romantic interest called police on him, not the mother of the 9-year-old. Drozd confirmed this fact in his ruling.

Alvarado’s affidavit says the girl told police that sometime in January 2007 Kastis had lured her into his home by promising her candy and Gatorade. Once inside, the girl said Kastis blocked the front door and kissed her on the lips five times. The girl also told police that she had seen Kastis grab another girl’s buttocks, leading police to find the other alleged victim, who later implicated Kastis, the affidavit says.

In the affidavit, Alvarado notes that police seized a candy dish and Gatorade from Kastis’ apartment. Police also confiscated his camera, home computer and books “with photos of nude girls under the age of 18,” the affidavit says.

Police later learned that there were “5,563 images of children being sexually exploited” on the computer files, Drozd’s ruling says.

“In addition, multiple sexually explicit stories in which the sexual molestation of children were a common theme were found on the defendant’s computer,” the ruling says. “Finally, 83 photos of 13-year-old girls that were sexual in nature, including images that appeared to have been produced by the defendant of children he had previously had access to, were found on that computer as well.”

In his ruling, Drozd called the seized images “extremely troubling evidence.” But he ruled the evidence had to be thrown out because police were reckless with the truth.

Drozd criticized Alvarado for asking a Superior Court judge to allow police to search Kastis’ home for stolen property or property that had its serial or identification number removed. A Superior Court judge approved this request, but Drozd said, “(This) provision had no apparent connection to the search” because there was on evidence or probable cause to believe Kastis engaged in stolen property or in the deletion of serial numbers.

Exculpatory evidence

Drozd’s main complaints were that Alvarado omitted several facts from his affidavit that could have proved Kastis was innocent, including:

▪ Neither the 9-year-old girl nor her parents made a complaint to police.

▪ The girl had given several different dates for the kissing incident;

▪ Another Clovis police officer found the girl had “lied” about how she got into Kastis’ apartment “and continued to lie when pressed on that detail.”

▪ The girl also “stated she never got any candy or Gatorade from the defendant.”

▪ The girl could not describe the color of furniture inside Kastis’ apartment.

▪ The girl told the other officer that her parents did not allow her to enter Kastis’ apartment.

In making his ruling, Drozd said Alvarado had a duty to write in his affidavit any exculpatory evidence – evidence that supports a defendant’s innocence.

“It has long been clearly established that an officer presenting a search warrant application has a duty to provide, in good faith, all relevant information” to the judge signing the warrant, Drozd said. Failing to do so is judicial deception. But Drozd said it was unclear if Alvarado “fully understood what exculpatory information or information detracting from a showing of probable cause is.”

Decade in jail

Kastis said his time in jail was spent in a cell block on the fourth floor of the north jail annex. He said living with nearly 75 inmates caused him severe emotional stress. “Remember, I had never been involved in the criminal justice system before this happened to me.”

Kastis said he started to suspect police were hiding evidence when he noticed that the police reports that were given to him said “Supplemental” and “Narrative continuation” on them.

“I kept thinking, ‘Where are the original reports? Where are the rest of the reports?’”

When he never got an answer from the attorneys he hired or the court, he fired his attorneys and made a motion to represent himself, which was granted in both Fresno Superior Court and U.S. District Court.

Kastis said he spent about $125,000 to hire lawyers, “the cream of the crop.”

Acting as his own lawyer was at first overwhelming, Kastis said. But he said he never questioned his belief in himself or in God. “I prayed to Him ever day. In the morning and at night. I thanked him for letting me live.”

The court record says Kastis was initially free on $51,000 bail after his arrest. But his bail jumped to $150,000 in August 2008 during his preliminary hearing when a Fresno Superior Court judge ordered him to stand trial. That same month, a federal grand jury indicted him on child pornography charges. He was ordered to remain in jail without bail.

In his ruling, Drozd says: “This criminal prosecution has a long and tortured history.” While the state proceedings dragged on, Drozd said, Kastis never appeared in U.S. District Court until his arraignment on federal child pornography chages in April 2016, nearly eight years after he was indicted by the grand jury.

Drozd also noted that in October 2011, Kastis had written a motion to suppress the evidence in Fresno Superior Court because of Alvarado’s faulty affidavit. He asked for a Franks hearing, which is a court proceeding in which a judge must determine whether a police officer provided accurate information in getting a warrant. Drozd’s rulling says a Superior Court judge denied Kastis’ motion to suppress the evidence in March 2013 without holding the Franks hearing.

Kastis said in an interview with The Bee that the judge never read his motion before denying it. “It was a total joke,” he said. “But that is what goes on in Superior Court.”

Drozd held a Franks hearing before making his ruling to suppress the evidence.

Hamburger, ice cream and shoes

Kastis said the first thing he did when he got out of jail was eat a McDonald’s hamburger and rocky road ice cream. He said he’s living with friends in Fresno who have given him a place to sleep and bought him clothing and shoes. “You don’t know good this feels,” he told a reporter about his new tennis shoes. In jail, he was required to wear sandals.

Another wonderful feeling comes at night, when he turns off the light and lies awake in total darkness on a fluffy pillow and a soft mattress. “In jail the lights were always on,” he said. “There was so much noise it was hard to sleep.”

He said he found relief by going to the jail’s law library every chance he could. He said he stayed out of trouble by helping other inmates with their cases and by respecting them.

Kastis said he could have gotten out of jail a lot sooner, but refused to take a plea deal that would have allowed him to be released with time served behind bars. “They wanted me to say I was guilty, when I’m innocent.”

He has a new mission: he wants police, prosecutors and Superior Court justices to pay him dearly for his time in jail.

“I lost everything,” Kastis said. “I lost my job. I lost friends, people very close to me. I lost my health and I lost my freedom.”

“But now it’s time to get them back for what they did to me,” he said. “For all of the harm they caused me.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2018 at 5:47 PM.