An expert prosecution witness testifying Thursday in the child molestation trial of a Rio Linda pastor said that only a scattered few allegations of sexual abuse reported to law enforcement by children turn out to be false.

Anthony J. Urquiza, director of the UC Davis Medical Center's CAARE Diagnostic and Treatment Center, said the rate of false allegations lodged with police stands somewhere between 1 percent and 6 percent.

"They do happen, but they happen very infrequently or rarely," Urquiza told a Sacramento Superior Court jury.

Urquiza testified as the last prosecution witness in the trial of Rio Linda Baptist Church pastor Tommy Gene Daniels. The 49-year-old defendant is accused of 12 counts of child molestation involving five young girls from 2003 to 2005.

All five of them testified that the molestations took place in Daniels' home on Wapiti Place in Citrus Heights. One of the girls had been going to the Daniels residence for three years for day care. The other four were foster children who had been placed there to live by their adoptive parents on the recommendation of a Loomis psychologist.

After Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Macy rested her case, defense attorney Michael L. Chastaine began his by calling a girl who had lived in the Daniels home as a foster child. Like four of Daniels' accusers, the girl had moved in with Daniels' family in a "respite care" program to give her own adoptive parents a break from her behavior.

The girl, now 18, lived in the home two years before the alleged molestations of the other girls took place. She said nothing inappropriate happened to her in the six to seven months she lived at the Daniels home.

The girl's mother also testified in the trial in front of Judge Trena H. Burger- Plavan that she didn't see anything that made her suspicious. But the woman also testified on cross-examination that she probably wouldn't have placed her daughter in the Daniels home if she knew the defendant's wife had misappropriated $4,000. Details of the alleged misappropriation suggested by Macy's questioning could not be obtained Thursday afternoon.

Urquiza, a professor in the UC Davis School of Medicine's pediatrics department, testified as an expert on what he called "child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome."

According to Urquiza, the theory of the syndrome holds that it is common for children to keep their victimization secret. He said it also explains a sense of helplessness and entrapment that children feel about their molestation. He testified that it is typical for children to delay reporting sexual molestation and that as many as 25 percent of victims will retract their allegations after they make them.

On cross-examination, Chastaine raised the issue of false allegations, and Macy followed up with rebuttal questions that elicited the answers about the infrequency of kids lying on the matter of their alleged sexual victimization.

Urquiza's testimony attacked the heart of the defense case. In his opening statement, Chastaine told jurors the prosecution of his client is largely based on the untruthful testimony of four of the five alleged victims. He suggested in his questioning of the four that they lied about the abuse and that the notion they had been sexually molested had been planted in their heads by another psychotherapist. He directly accused one of the girls of lying in his cross-examination of her.

In putting on his own case, Chastaine called another woman in her mid-20s who testified she lived in the Daniels residence for a while five years ago and frequently went to their house when she was in grade school. She said she never saw or heard of any inappropriate behavior on Daniels' part.

Chastaine also called an expert, Dr. Jeremy H. Colley, who is the chief of psychiatric services at Mule Creek State Prison.

Colley testified about the side effects of assorted antipsychotic and other medications. Four of the girls who testified against Daniels said they were taking the substances when they lived in his house in 2003 and 2004. Among the side effects of the drugs, Colley said, are "sedation" and "somnolence."

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