David Lane Braff Jr. Is Held Without Bail on 33 Counts and 141 Special Allegations After the Santa Paula Counseling Case Grew to 15 Children
The number that traveled on the night of the arrest is no longer the number on the charging document. David Lane Braff Jr. was booked on November 22, 2024, while he was an assistant principal and counselor at Ingenium Charter Middle School in Winnetka. Ventura County prosecutors say the conduct they are taking to trial did not happen in that office. It tracks the jobs that came before it. A judge has now held him to answer on 33 felony counts of lewd acts upon a child under 14, naming 15 victims, with 141 special allegations attached. He has pleaded not guilty. He is held without bail at Todd Road Jail. The maximum exposure, the district attorney’s office has said, is 825 years to life. There is still no verdict.
Early headlines, including the one this file first carried, said eight elementary students. A later account in the Ventura County Star described the opening information as 17 counts tied to six students at McKevett Elementary in Santa Paula. Investigators at the preliminary hearing testified that 13 of the 15 people now named were McKevett students, from kindergarten through fifth grade, during the years Braff counseled there. The other two stretch the map to Bright Star Schools in Los Angeles and to his time with the Conejo Recreation and Park District. The AEGIS Alliance is not going to pick a favorite first-night integer. The amended complaint is the document a jury would hear.
Braff was born May 28, 1982, and lived in Thousand Oaks. Public employment records put him at McKevett from August 2015 to November 2019. The campus once named him counselor of the month. Before Santa Paula he worked as a recreation leader for the Conejo parks district and, briefly in the summer of 2014, as a behavioral therapist. After he left the elementary school he moved into Los Angeles-area charter work, including Bright Star and then Ingenium. His teaching credential stayed active until it was suspended on November 26, 2024, four days after the first charges. That sequence is the institutional fact parents keep repeating: the arrest came first, and the paper that lets a person work around children came second.
What the preliminary hearing actually decided
On April 28, 2026, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Julia Snyder listened to investigators describe forensic interviews with each of the 15 named victims and ruled there was sufficient cause to believe the offenses were committed and that this defendant committed them. “There is sufficient cause to believe the offenses have been committed,” she said. Braff sat in a jail uniform with his ankles chained. Senior Deputy District Attorney Emily Reber, the office’s cold-case sexual-assault prosecutor, is handling the case for District Attorney Erik Nasarenko. A further arraignment was set for June 3, 2026. A pretrial conference was later calendared for September 15. No public report in the days after that date described a guilty plea or a jury being sworn. Held to answer is a gate. It is not a conviction. The presumption of innocence still sits on every count.
The special allegations are where the exposure becomes generational. Prosecutors allege multiple victims, a position of trust, particularly vulnerable children, and planning and sophistication. Those findings, if a jury adopts them, are what produce a term measured in centuries rather than a single mid-range felony. They also explain the no-bail hold. Ventura County has treated the risk as too high for a number. That is a detention decision. It is not testimony a reader can weigh from a press release.
One detail from the preliminary hearing did not fit the “lone counselor” script. Ventura County Star reporter Makena Huey wrote that a prosecution witness testified the Santa Paula Police Department failed to properly investigate students’ reports of sexual assault. If that testimony holds at trial, the case stops being only a story about one employee’s access. It becomes a story about a report that reached a police department and did not become a case until years and another campus later. Discovery, not a homepage, will show what was in the folder. The honest public sentence until then is the one the timeline already proves: he kept working with children after the McKevett years.
Three civil captions beside one jail cell
Criminal court is not the only caption with his name. On July 20, 2026, a third lawsuit was filed in Ventura County Superior Court against Braff and Santa Paula Unified School District. The Ventura County Star reported that the complaint accuses the district of negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and accuses Braff of assault, sexual battery, and gender violence, over alleged abuse of a McKevett student. Two other former students had already sued. A hearing on the 2025 civil case was set for September 11, 2026. Hearings on the newer suits were set for December 18. Civil lawyers do not need a criminal conviction to file. They need a plaintiff, a theory that administrators had notice, and a district that employed the counselor. Insurers read those complaints even when juries have not.
Ingenium’s statement the week of the arrest said the school was devastated, that it learned of the McKevett allegations from Ventura County, and that it moved to keep its own students away from him. That is the sentence every campus writes after a booking. Parents in Santa Paula have spent the months since asking a prior question: why a counselor with daily access to small children could leave one district and keep a youth-facing job in another. Charter networks hire from a pool that has already passed through someone else’s personnel office. Each hop is a chance for a file to stay behind.
California has spent years reopening windows for survivors to sue institutions. Intake pages already list Braff’s name. That marketplace is not a substitute for the 33-count information. It is pressure on a district budget. The criminal case still has to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, count by count, in a courtroom where the defense can cross-examine the interviews. Anyone who writes “convicted” because a judge said “held to answer” is writing a different case from the one on the docket.
The first-night video and the list that grew
NBCLA’s Robert Kovacik packaged the arrest for the 11 o’clock news. That package is the embed at the top of this page because it is the cleanest contemporaneous account of the first booking: McKevett named, Ingenium named as the employer of that week, a victim count that fit a single broadcast. Later filings outgrew the script. Keeping the first-night video is how a news file shows the expansion instead of pretending the case arrived fully grown. The district attorney has asked anyone with information to call Investigator Greg Webb at 805-477-1627. That number is an invitation, not a conclusion.
Readers who follow crime reporting at The AEGIS Alliance have seen the same hinge in other buildings. A former El Cajon Bible teacher, Kevin Conover, took a plea in a case that should never have lived as an internal personnel matter. A South Carolina sports anchor, Matthew Turner Vereen, drew a prison term after a device search. Different jobs. Same failure: a title that buys time alone with children, and an institution that keeps the title current until a detective knocks. School-access cases stay on the Crime News and US News desks, and on the #OpChildSafety tag, because they are a map, not local color.
No photograph on this page shows a child. The image used with the original arrest is a campus and a booking portrait, and it remains the featured image rather than a second copy in the body. Anything else belongs in a sealed envelope. If this account is difficult, talk with someone you trust or a professional resource. In the United States, child-abuse reports can go to local law enforcement or a county child-welfare hotline.
Braff remains, on the public record, a defendant held to answer on 33 felony counts involving 15 children, facing 141 special allegations and a theoretical term of 825 years to life, sitting without bail while Santa Paula Unified answers civil complaints. He has pleaded not guilty. The first headline counted eight. The charging document does not.
