When Ches Fry retired as a parole agent I with the California Department of Corrections Division of Adult Parole Operations, the job had become increasingly difficult, in part because of the city’s lenient reputation. “I’ve had many conversations with parolees, like drug dealers who all lived in Oakland. They said they came to San Francisco to deal because they don’t get arrested. They didn’t go past the San Francisco County line; they didn’t like going south. They get prosecuted there,” Fry said in an exclusive interview with The Voice.
There was also San Francisco’s sanctuary city law which, despite never having been meant to harbor criminals, does exactly that. “I had a parolee, a Mexican National with a fake green card, who sexually assaulted a woman in the middle of the street in broad daylight. I couldn’t get him deported. He ‘completed his parole successfully’ but I arrested him several times. I also had grandparents who molested their grandkids. I was told ‘we don’t deal with ICE.’ Nothing.”
However, what took the difficulty to another level, according to Fry, was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Covid rules. During the pandemic, Newsom used the potential spread of coronavirus to justify the early release of over 25,000 California inmates and parolees, including violent repeat felons. In April 2020, following Gov. Newsom’s State of Emergency proclamation, parole agents received a memo instructing them to avoid sending parolees to jail or prison except when there was “an imminent threat to public safety or when state statutes require detaining them.” The memo also stated that agents “should not conduct routine inspections of parolees’ living quarters or test them for drugs.”
As reported in a Voice exclusive, these relaxed rules led to the notorious case of parolee Troy McAlister, who struck and killed 60-year-old Elizabeth Platt and 27-year-old Hanako Abe in San Francisco on Dec. 31, 2020, in a vehicle carjacked from a woman after he displayed a firearm. That arrest was one of several over a six-month period that should have resulted in the issuance of a parole hold, yet supervisors repeatedly ignored McAlister’s escalating crimes.
According to Fry and other former and current parole agents the Voice interviewed, there were thousands of incidents after the Covid releases where parolees committed heinous crimes that didn’t make the news. In one of Fry’s most memorable cases, his supervisor told him to return methamphetamine and electronics to a drug-addicted registered sex offender.
“A guy named Donovan James Boileau ended up on parole in 2017 out of Georgia where he molested a 17-year-old girl, resulting in him being registered as a sex offender. There’s an interstate compact agreement with all states that if a parolee meets criteria for wherever they want to go — education, job, family — you have to take them,” Fry explained. “So, in his twenties Boileau came back to San Francisco to live with his parents. He was the sketchiest dude — always way too nice, and we knew he was full of s—t. We would do home checks and catch him slamming meth — he was a huge meth head. He would scream at his parents and say they were horrible people and curse at them. But they bowed down to him and said he was doing great. There was really nothing we could do since verbal abuse is rarely prosecuted.”
Fry and his partner made a point of showing up late nights at Boileau’s job, where he worked the midnight shift at a warehouse in South San Francisco. They would “catch him for petty crimes.” Then something strange happened. “We have him on GPS and he’s popping up in Benicia late at night. I called him in and he gave me a bulls—t story. I found a number for someone named Jessie in his wallet. Boileau says ‘he’s just a friend.’ Then I get an anonymous text message with a link to Jessie’s Instagram — turns out he is a 14-year-old boy doing risqué poses like wearing see-through underwear with his butt in the camera. In the left-hand corner of Jessie’s post, I see Boileau’s profile — that’s who he’s talking to. In the image, Boileau is wearing this distinctive hat.”
During a search of Boileau’s bedroom, Fry and his partner found meth and the hat. “We book him, and that’s when we learn that Jessie has been locked in Boileau’s bedroom for three days while his parents were home. Jessie confessed to his dad and that’s how we found out that he lied to his parents and said he was camping with friends, but in reality, he was holed up with Boileau, doing meth and having sex. We watched the police interview with Jessie, and he says they would have sex in the car in a parking lot in Benicia and Boileau said he loved him.”
According to Fry and other former and current parole agents the Voice interviewed, there were thousands of incidents after the Covid releases where parolees committed heinous crimes that didn’t make the news
Just prior to receiving the anonymous text, Boileau had been transferred to Agent Cullen Koepsell’s caseload. “All three of us in the Sex Offender Unit worked collaboratively to build the case,” Fry explained, “but ultimately it was Cullen’s hard work and due diligence that led to the conviction.”
The Solano County District Attorney prosecuted Boileau and wound up giving him a plea deal. With time for good behavior, he was out in a year, but with a new parole number for the latest offense. “That’s when he got more agitated, shiftier, his GPS was all over,” Fry said. “He’s not supposed to have a smartphone or social media — no laptop, he can have a flip phone and that’s it. But he always had a smartphone when we caught him. So, I just kept tracking him because I knew he was up to no good.”
At one point, Boileau’s GPS showed he was at a motel in the Pier 39 area of San Francisco, so Fry headed over. “I’m going to the door and there is this sketchy white kid watching me. Boileau answers the door and says, ‘Oh you met John?’ I’m like, ‘John come here.’ I detain John, who is Boileau’s dealer — he’s got 30 grams of individual packets of meth and he’s on parole in Placer County for drug sales.” Fry searched Boileau’s motel room, where he found two laptops between the mattress and the boxsprings and a smartphone in the nightstand. He also finds meth and a hype kit, which is equipment used for injecting narcotics.
Fry thought he finally had Boileau on a big parole violation, but instead of congratulating him on catching the child predator, Supervisor Onyanga Dean was livid. “I tell Dean that I’m going to bust both of these guys and he says, ‘You’re going to put all that stuff back and write this up as a regular home check.’ He told me to let the dealer go, hand the meth back to Boileau, and let him keep his electronics.” Dean warned that if Fry disobeyed his orders he would write him up for Covid violations. “I turned to Boileau and slammed the laptops into his chest. I just dumped the whole hype kit in a garbage can. I refused to give that back. I lied about it on my report,” Fry recalled. “Then I asked the police officers to get everything on their body cams for possible future reference.” Fry let out an audible sigh of frustration. “All of this was coming down from Newsom because he wanted it to look like rehabilitation was working and there was less crime. He weaponized Covid to let these guys out, then told our supervisors to make sure we didn’t check for new violations to keep them from going back to jail or prison.”
Plea for help from an ex-girlfriend
In early 2021, Fry got a call from a trans woman named Erica Soto, the ex-girlfriend of Boileau. “Erica was with him through all of this stuff, and she always lied to me and covered for him. But then I get a call that she wants my help. She says they broke up because he was abusing her and now, he’s stalking her. At one point, Erica was hiding at a friend’s house, and Boileau showed up with a knife on the Ring doorbell camera trying to beat the windows and doors down to get to her.”
After speaking to Soto, Fry wrote up a report and turned it over to John Keane, a “phenomenal detective” in the San Francisco Police Department. “Erica worked at a store and one day Boileau showed up. Witnesses at the store said she was outside on a break and he pulls up and tries to kidnap her by pulling her into his car in the middle of the street in broad daylight. I knew this side of him was there. Fortunately, she was able to get away. He was arrested and got out. I helped Erica get a temporary restraining order for domestic violence and I served Boileau with it. My boss lost his s—t. ‘You can’t do that! Tell the police!’ I was like ‘We are the police!’ John, the investigator, did so much work and got it to eight felony counts.”
Despite Boileau’s long criminal history, child sex offender status, and the domestic violence against Soto, then District Attorney Chesa Boudin pleaded the eight felonies down to two misdemeanors. “I wanted Boileau in El Centro on the Mexican border, as far away from Erica as possible,” Fry said, only half joking. “After I retired, they got him transferred back to Georgia.”
Dean, the San Francisco parole supervisor who told Fry to return the laptops and meth to Boileau, took a job as district administrator for parole offices in the southern district and moved back to Bakersfield where he owns a home.
Boileau has violated his probation numerous times including on July 19, 2024, when he was arrested at a home in Rome, Georgia, for possession of a needle filled with methamphetamine intended for injection. He was arrested again in July 2025 and is currently in custody at the Bartow County Sheriff’s Office Jail.
