Jury Finds Andrew Sharp, 22, Guilty of Raping His 9-Year-Old Cousin and Faces Life in Prison

In her final moments cross-examining Donald Andrew Sharp this morning, Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark had the 22-year-old former babysitter hold up a drawing to the jury. It was drawn by the 9-year-old girl he’d raped in Palm Coast starting when she was 8. The drawing was a remarkable likeness of Sharp–his bushy black beard, his long black hair, his squat stature, his reddish shirt.

And of Sharp without pants, and of Sharp’s penis, drawn in a simple, oblong black-penciled shape perpendicular to his body: erect.




“You would agree that looks a lot like you,” Clark asked Sharp.

“Yes, it does,” he said.

“And you will agree that she actually drew you with an erect penis.”

“It would seem that way,” he said.

“Because that is exactly what she had seen on your body, right?” Clark asked.

“No, ma’am.”

Sharp’s attorney, Spencer O’Neal, pointed out to the jury that the child added the penis after her Child Protection Team interviewer asked her to include the “thing” the girl had been referring to. But why was it erect?

Sharp, the girl had told her interviewer and testified in court, had used the “thing” to rape her orally and anally in exchange for extra Xbox time. He had also used his hand to rape her vaginally, and had enticed her slightly older brother to molest her so Sharp could pin the blame on him if his monstrosities with the girl were ever uncovered. Which was precisely his defense during this four-day trial, which ended today.

A jury of three women and three men deliberated four hours and 15 minutes before rendering a verdict of guilty on all seven counts Sharp faced, as charged, five of them capital felonies, each of which carries a mandatory life in prison term. He is to be sentenced in a few weeks.




The child’s father, who had testified during the trial, was in attendance with his wife during closing arguments, when he had to hear the voice of his child describe Sharp’s most heinous assaults against her in the brief clips Clark re-played for the jury, and when he had to hear Sharp himself admit the acts to him in a phone call detectives had recorded. The father, hands clutched with his wife’s, looked as if he were being tortured as the clips played, his eyes closed and avoiding the screens in the courtroom, or avoiding looking at Sharp, who sat at the defendant’s table without expression. When the verdict was read, the child’s father, his eyes closed, simply continued clutching his wife’s hand.

Sharp did not react. He was immediately handcuffed.

He had given the jury little choice. He had confessed to the victims’ father. He had confessed to detectives. The girl in her Child Protection Team interview had been as descriptive in her words as she was in her drawing, at one point standing up to show the interviewer Sharp’s thrusting motion when he was raping her. Her brother, who also testified, described how Sharp had directed him to molest his sister.

Sharp’s defense was two-fold: denying that he’d done anything, and blaming the brother and sister for pointing the finger at him, as a scapegoat for their own acts. O’Neal in his closing argument dismissed the prosecution’s claim that the children had no way to know what Sharp was going to say when confronted with the accusations, though Sharp’s confessions matched with their accounts.




“In this situation, the children are the ones pointing the finger,” O’Neal said. “They’re the ones saying Mr. Sharp, Donald Sharp, did this. They know the truth. Of course, they are going to know that he is going to say that did not happen, and that this is what happened. That’s common sense. That’s how finger pointing works. So to point out that they knew what his statement was going to be, or who he was going to say did what, just shows that they knew the truth of what happened.”

But as Clark told the jury in her closing argument today, the children never needed a scapegoat. Sharp had been gone from the house for three months when the girl told her stepmother that he’d been “inappropriate” with her, triggering the investigation and the charges. No one in the house knew of the girl and her brother’s acts. They had no need for a scapegoat. That part of the account emerged later, when the girl described it to the Child Protection Team investigator, and when the brother described Sharp’s instigation.

Two and a half hours into deliberations, the jury wanted to see the clip of the Child Protection Team interview where the victim describes Sharp’s attempt to sodomize her. The jury was brought into the courtroom for the showing–about 45 seconds’ worth, long enough that by the time the jury walked back to its deliberation room, one of the jurors was in tears. The judge noted it for the record.



An hour later, the jury had another question, again concerned with the same issue. This time the jury wanted to listen to the audio of Sharp’s interview with detectives, when they discussed that part of the assaults.

The jury’s questions suggested that, faced with a long list of charges seeking check marks under “guilty” or “not guilty,” there may have been some disagreement, or at least remaining questions, about specific charges–did he assault her anally? The jury did not have the same question about oral assaults. The successive questions also suggested that there was disagreement among jururs as to what constitutes rape. Is it rape when there is no penetration?

The assaults took place at the P-Section house in Palm Coast where Sharp lived, as a live-in nanny for five children, between May 2001 and May 2002. The girl he assaulted was 8 and 9 at the time, her brother was 11 and 12. Sharp said he never touched the other siblings, who were his second cousins.

Sharp claimed he’d surprised the children in inappropriate acts repeatedly, and stopped them. But he also admitted that he never told their parents about it, though the acts stretched over months, and never so much as disciplined the older brother–not for the inappropriate sex, anyway,m though he disciplined him and his four siblings over many other things, rewarding them with Xbox time or denying them Xbox and TV time. He never told about the inappropriate acts, Clark told the jury, because he wanted them to continue–because they were his creation, to his benefit, so he could also continue assaulting the girl.

Nor could the jury believe his story that he’d confessed to the child’s father–the man who’d essentially raised him, too, and who was more father than uncle or cousin–not because what he was saying was true, but to “bring him peace of mind” the day before the father’s open-heart surgery.

“What he wants you to believe defies all common sense,” Clark said. “So he wants us to believe that on the night before a man he loves, John, who’s been in his life since he was a baby, is about to go in for a major surgery. That the only way to bring John peace is to say that he molested his 8-year-old daughter. That makes absolutely no sense. None whatsoever. If anything that will cause more anguish to a man that’s already stressed out about having major surgery the next day.” (The names of family members involved, other than SHarp, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.)




Sharp also testified that the only reason he confessed to Flagler County Sheriff’s detectives Dan LaVerne and James Crosbee, who investigated the case, was because he wanted them to leave him alone. “It’s just insane to think that his logic is, if I admit to doing these horrific things to an 8 year old, that’s going to get the police to leave me alone,” Clark told the jury. “A reasonable person would think the exact opposite would happen if you admit to having an 8 year old perform oral sex on you and you admit to putting your penis at her anus and you admit to touching her vagina, to the police of all people. The last thing they’re going to do is walk away and say: thank you, have a great day. In what world does that happen? It doesn’t. It defies all logic, because it’s just not true. It didn’t happen. He said what he said because he knew the gig was up.”

Before trial the state offered Sharp a plea deal resulting in 40 years in prison, day for day (no early release as with most other crimes). He turned it down.

He was found guilty on four counts of raping a child younger than 12, a count of molestation, and two counts of being a principal to rape and to molestation–the counts related to his directing the girl’s brother to molest her.

Previously:

• 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