Six Life Terms for Andrew Sharp, 22, Who Repeatedly Assaulted His 8-Year-Old Cousin and Procured Her

Just as his adult life was beginning–an adulthood he nullified of his own will when he turned predator against his own pre-pubescent cousins–22-year-old Donald Andrew Sharp was sentenced to life in prison today.

Circuit Judge Terence Perkins pronounced the sentence at the end of a brief, undramatic, six weeks after a jury found Sharp guilty of raping his 9-year-old cousin and procuring her as a sexual toy to her slightly older brother.




Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark, who prosecuted the case, argued that the procurement indicated the depth of Sharp’s calculated depravity: he had figured on blaming the child’s brother if accusations were ever turned on him, Sharp–as, in fact, he did when he took the stand in his defense. He claimed he had attempted to stop the siblings’ behavior, repeatedly, though he never once told their parents.

Their parents: they had taken Sharp in at their Palm Coast home after he drifted aimlessly out of high school after graduation in Huntington, W. Va., thinking at one point that he might attend mechanic school in Orlando, which he barely did. He ended up being the children’s nanny, at least officially so. For about a year, unbeknownst to the children’s father and his new wife, Sharp was assaulting the girl and manipulating the boy into a shield for his own crimes at their P-Section home in Palm Coast starting in May 2021. The girl was 8 when he started abusing her. Her brother was 11.

A jury convicted Sharp on seven charges, five of them capital felonies that, in a previous age, would have made him eligible for the death penalty. (The Legislature last year restored the death-penalty eligibility, but the legislation is currently illegal as it flouts U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Since Sharp committed the offenses against the child before the law passed, he was not eligible for prosecution under the new law.)




Perkins had no choice. Under the law, the convictions for the capital felonies are mandatory life terms. On five of those counts, Perkins imposed concurrent life sentences. On a sixth count, he imposed a consecutive life sentence, and on the seventh count–molestation, also a life felony but not a capital one—he imposed a 25-year sentence, consecutive to the first five counts. The judge had to impose the count-by-count sentences by law, making the process sound more arcane, if not absurd, than the simple reality Sharp was left with: he would never again see freedom, let alone his native West Virginia.

Baleful and immobile as he had been throughout his trial, but his militantly-black beard shaved down to stubbles, Sharp said nothing this morning, didn’t look up from his chair, didn’t attempt to glimpse the parents of the children he had victimized as they sat in the first row of the gallery, as they had during trial. Their emotions were more in check today than they had been during trial, when they had to endure seeing their child on video getting interviewed by a Child Protection Team investigator about what she had gone through (both children testified at trial), hear clips from Sharp lying than apologizing to the children’s father, the man who’d taken him in, or testify and relive some of the traumas.

Also present were the detectives who investigated the case, Dan LaVerne and James Crosby of the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office. It was their investigation that all but made the conviction certain. They had secured a long “controlled,” or recorded call, between Sharp and the children’s father (a former cop), where Sharp made his admissions. They had their own long recorded interview of Sharp in West Virginia–a verbal web of concentric circles that LaVerne and Crosby methodically closed on Sharp. It made it impossible for Sharp to extricate himself from it when he took the stand, as his contradictions and lies were took obvious to see.




Often at sentencing hearings the friends and family of the defendant sit in the gallery row immediately behind the defendant’s table and the bar, while the families and friends of the victims sit opposite, behind the prosecutors’ table. The rows behind Sharp were empty today, the family he’d had in West Virginia being limited to a grandmother, and the family he’d had in Palm Coast now sitting on the other side, by his own doing.

The assaults had stretched over a year. The trial took four days. The sentencing took all of 15 minutes, and when it was over, bailiffs finger-printed Sharp, as is required of every inmate entering the rather brutal Florida prison system, then ushered him out the side door.

See:

• “Jury Finds Andrew Sharp, 22, Guilty of Raping His 9-Year-Old Cousin and Faces Life in Prison.”
• In Trial’s Opening, Prosecution Describes Andrew Sharp, 22, as Babysitter Turned Sexual Predator on His Own Young Cousins
• Babysitter Accused of Turning Predator Against Children in His Care Confronts His Most Damning Witness: Himself