Roseann Kasama Welsh
Sex predator arrested following manhunt in woman's death, child's abduction in Clay County
By Jim Schoettler and Dana Treen
jacksonville.com
Clay County authorities arrested a registered sexual predator wanted for questioning Tuesday in the death of a woman and the abduction of a young girl, according to the Clay County Sheriff’s Office.
Donald Hugh Davidson Jr., 34, of the 5700 block of Canvasback Road, Middleburg, was charged with capital sexual battery of a victim younger than 12, kidnapping and auto theft.
He was taken into custody about 2:30 a.m. on Blanding Boulevard near Jefferson Avenue in Orange Park after he was spotted driving a stolen minivan. He was pulled over and taken into custody without incident, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Earlier authorities said they responded to the 4800 block of Mayflower Street and found 35-year-old Roseann Kasama Welsh dead about 6:05 p.m. Monday. Her 13-year-old son discovered her body.
Deputies indicated Welsh was killed, but didn’t provide specifics. Her grandfather declined to comment on the case Tuesday.
A 10-year-old girl was abducted and possibly sexually assaulted but has been located and is safe, the Sheriff’s Office said.
Davidson has prior convictions for sexual battery and aggravated battery, the Sheriff’s Office said.
He was released from prison in September following a 2010 sentencing on two counts of lewd molestation and an aggravated battery on a pregnant female, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
The convictions came after Davidson violated a 2006 probation on convictions of touching young girls inappropriately in 2004 and 2005. He was still on probation in June 2010 when he was charged in the attack of a 22-year-old woman who was four months pregnant.
According to that arrest report, a strange-acting Davidson appeared at the woman’s Middleburg home on Chicory Circle about a truck she had for sale. The report said he asked her to strip and have sex. He also told her he was using cocaine.
The report said the woman knew a cousin of Davidson’s, who she called and who told her to bring Davidson to his house. But Davidson refused to leave then attacked the woman, choking her around the neck and knocking her to the floor, despite her crying out for the assault to stop and that she was pregnant. She was able to escape and climbed a fence to a neighbor’s, the report said.
Davidson appeared at the same hospital where the woman was taken and complained of chest pains. He told investigators he knew that the victim was pregnant because she told him so two or three months earlier.
When Davidson was apprehended Tuesday, an ankle bracelet monitored by the state Department of Corrections had been removed, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Mary Justino.
Corrections spokesman McKinley Lewis said when tracking bracelets are removed, they immediately alert the wearer’s probation officer, who then must contact the appropriate law enforcement agency. He said Clay
County was told that Davidson’s bracelet had been removed but did not have details about the timing.
“It would have been within minutes,” he said.
He did not know the frequency with which a bracelet reports a wearer’s actual location or how soon the probation officer would be alerted if Davidson moved away from an area where he was allowed to be.
Following Davidson’s arrest, crisis-intervention teams were on standby for Wilkinson junior and elementary schools, Justino said.
A Florida Department of Law Enforcement database shows about 130 sex offenders within three miles of Davidson’s home address and the address where the attack occurred. The two residences are close enough there is some overlap in the data.
Davidson was living at the same address as another sex offender, according to the Department of Law Enforcement.
A briefing is scheduled for 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Sheriff’s Office.
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