LOCKPORT – A Town of Tonawanda man, who served a prison sentence for taking a 4-year-old North Tonawanda girl on a joyride in 2007, was arraigned Thursday on charges of kidnapping a 5-year-old girl in that city and sexually abusing her.
Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Farkas ordered David J. Grover, 34, of Niagara Falls Boulevard, held without bail after he pleaded not guilty to first-degree sexual abuse and two counts of second-degree kidnapping, with one of them deemed to be a sexually motivated felony.
Assistant District Attorney Robert A. Zucco said Grover allegedly took the girl from her mother’s home in North Tonawanda July 28 and kept her for several hours. At some point in their travels in Erie County, Grover allegedly had sexual contact with her in what Zucco called “a secluded outdoor location.”
After that, the prosecutor said, Grover tried to return the girl to her father’s home in the City of Tonawanda; the girl’s parents are separated. “What he was planning to do there, we don’t know,” Zucco told Farkas.
However, Grover found that the girl’s uncle was home. Zucco said Grover ended up barricading himself in the bathroom and taking a shower before his mother came to the scene and brought him out to be arrested.
“This individual has forfeited the right to bail,” Zucco said, and the judge agreed.
Assistant Public Defender Christopher A. Privateer asked for “a reasonable bail” and made no further comment.
Zucco said Grover “was an acquaintance of the father and the mother, a longtime acquaintance.”
The incident occurred 41 days after Grover’s parole expired on his 2007 conviction for first-degree reckless endangerment, Zucco said.
Grover pleaded guilty in the earlier case with the 2007 abduction of a 4-year-old girl from her North Tonawanda home, followed by a five-hour joyride through the Tonawandas and Amherst. There were no sex charges in that case; Grover told police he used cocaine before taking the girl. He knew the girl and her parents, and was let into her home by the girl’s grandmother.

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