Hartford charter school leader pleads innocent to four gunpoint sexual assaults
Michael M. Sharpe, whose Hartford-based charter school network
got tens of millions of dollars in financing from the state before the Courant newspaper revealed
his resume was phony and he had a criminal history, denied in court Monday that he is guilty of the gunpoint sexual assaults of four women.
One of Sharpes relatives happened to purchase a DNA profile kit from a private company that provides genetic analyses to people researching their ancestries. The relatives profile, with her consent, was downloaded to an open source database often consulted by people doing deep, ancestral research. Then, a firm under contract to state law enforcement located a familial match through the open source data and notified state law enforcement.
He is accused of assaulting a 25-year-old woman in Bloomfield, a 30-year-old woman in Middletown, a 24-year-old woman in Windsor and a 24-year-old woman in Rocky Hill. In each case, the victims told police that they were confronted in their homes by an intruder, who pointed a gun at each of them, told them not to scream and then sexually assaulted them. In at least two cases, the victims said the intruder had claimed to have just shot someone before breaking into their home.
In 1985, a year after the rapes, he was accused of and pleaded guilty to forgery for falsifying documents he used to get a $415,000 loan from the City of Hartford to redevelop an apartment building. He was next arrested in San Francisco, where he had been hired as real estate manager for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Not long after, he was ensnared in a federal corruption investigation and pleaded guilty in 1989 to embezzling more than $100,000. In he had received $53 million in state grants.
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-michael-sharpe-rapes-20210830-20210831-crhx2pigbvf4tc7azczqvzq5qi-story.html