Sex Offender HQ

11-27-2009 Connecticut:

Hartford has the biggest concentration of registered sex offenders, many of them living in homeless shelters, in all of Connecticut

There are approximately four times as many registered sex offenders living on Laurel Street in Hartford as there are in the entire city of Greenwich.

Laurel has 19 offenders on one block.

Greenwich has five. Total.

At the McKinney Shelter on Huyshope Avenue, there are 29 registered sex offenders, about half of whom committed acts against minors. Seven are listed as non-compliant, meaning they've failed to verify their addresses, as required by law.

Madison Avenue has 17 registered offenders. Park Street has 26. There are similar concentrations of sex offenders throughout the city, from Albany Avenue to Wethersfield Avenue. None of this is lost on Police Chief Daryl K. Roberts. He formed a sex offender unit two years ago after noticing the number of offenders being released.

"We can't prohibit them from coming to the city, but we are responsible for keeping track of them," said police spokeswoman Nancy Mulroy.

"[Hartford] is being used as a dumping ground to put people nobody else wants," she said. "I just know that 500-plus sex offenders aren't originally from Hartford."

That may be, says Bill Carbone, who oversees probation for sex offenders as executive director of the Judicial Branch's Court Support Services Division. But state officials have little choice. Homeless shelters in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport are often the only housing option for sex offenders newly released from prison.

"It's a problem," Carbone said. "The reason you have so many that initially end up in shelters is we do not have families that are willing to have them move back in."

Carbone has been pushing for the past several years for the state to build housing — on state land — specifically for sex offenders. He says about $3 million was allocated a couple of years ago, "but due to budget cutbacks, it's never been spent." And even if he could spend the money, Carbone knows it would be very hard to find a site where he wouldn't run into a storm of protest.

"I think everybody is facing the same issue with sex offenders," said Carbone. "In most states they're doing the same thing we're doing, which is using the shelter system."

Lt. Mark Tedeschi is commander of the police department's juvenile investigative division, which houses the sex offender unit that keeps tabs on the 537 offenders listed on the registry for Hartford. "We have the greatest amount of sex offenders in Connecticut, roughly 10 percent [of the total number of offenders] reside in our city," he said.

Tedeschi says police divide the city's 18 square miles into four districts: the northwest district, where Laurel Street is located, has 115 out of 537 sex offenders; the northeast district has 112; the southwest district has 157; and the southeast district has 153.

There are no restrictions in Connecticut on where registered sex offenders can live unless specified in their parole or probation, said Detective Victor Otero, commander of the sex offender unit. Offenders are required, however, to verify their addresses every three months so police know where to find them. If they don't, they're non-compliant and subject to arrest, like the seven offenders listed as living at McKinney.

"We go out and do compliance checks," said Otero, adding the majority of registered offenders are not on probation or parole, "so nobody is watching over them."

The northwest district, where Laurel Street is, has the highest compliance among registered sex offenders of any district, at 98 percent. The others have compliance percentage rates in the mid to high 80s, Tedeschi said.

City residents are often surprised that sex offenders live nearby. Gwendolyn Turner, a social worker at the Community Renewal Team at 211 Laurel St., said she had no idea 19 sex offenders lived on the street. Her center serves 75 children. But Nancy Pappas, director of external affairs for CRT, said children arrive and leave with their parents and are monitored constantly by center staff.

"CRT has programs to help folks, not specifically sex offenders, but people who've had time in prison," Pappas said. "It would be hypocritical of us to say, 'OK, well, we have 78 classrooms of Head Start and you can't be near any of them.'"

A woman living on Laurel Street, who asked not to be identified, contacted the Advocate to share an e-mail she sent on Sept. 28 to 311@hartford.gov, the city's help line: "Why are the standards in Hartford so low?" she wrote. "I live on Laurel Street, and besides all the prostitutes and drug addicts and people breaking in vehicles, there are 19 registered sex offenders within the 270-330 block, 8 of them living in one building at 270 Laurel Street, some with charges against children, some without. How is that even possible?"

Nearly a month later, on Oct. 20, the woman received a reply from 311.com, telling her the best way to address the issue was to discuss it with the Asylum Hill Neighborhood Revitalization Zone, her local community group. She decided not to bother.

"I didn't even know it existed," she said of the NRZ. "It seems like it would be a waste of time, just somewhere for people to complain."

Otero sympathizes, but says he isn't sure what could be changed. He points out residency restrictions have only driven sex offenders underground, making the situation worse.

"Every place is within 1,500 feet of a school or a playground or a church," said Otero. "Where would these people look for housing?"

That was exactly the problem for Phil Palmieri, a registered sex offender living in New Haven. Palmieri, 37, was convicted in 2006 of sexual assault in the second degree for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. He says he met her online, but not on MySpace or any of the other social networking sites. Palmieri says he was under the mistaken impression that the age of consent was 15, but as it turned out, he didn't even wait for that milestone.

"I did the typical dumb male thing. I thought with the wrong head and here I am," Palmieri said.

Released in 2008 after two years in prison, he's on probation for the next 10 years and is currently living in the Duncan Hotel on Chapel Street because he says he couldn't live anywhere else. He works as a bellhop to help pay his $200 weekly rent.

"It's a roof over my head and it's not a homeless shelter, but it's only a step above," Palmieri said. "Anywhere you're going to live has to be approved by probation, and quite frankly they don't care if you end up homeless." Parole officials wouldn't approve his moving back in with his parents because their apartment complex is near minors.

Palmieri calls his liaison with a 14-year-old girl the biggest mistake of his life, but says he can't move on, because the state won't let him.

"These people don't believe you can learn your lesson on your own," Palmieri said. "They believe they have to be monitoring you."

In fact, the new sex offender online registry launched by Gov. M. Jodi Rell makes it easier for the general public to monitor registered sex offenders. It sends e-mail alerts when offenders move to your neighborhood. Police will be able to search the database using a physical description by August 2010.

"With this registry process we know where they reside," Tedeschi said. "Any time there's a sex crime, pedophile or adult, we have a place to start and at least initiate the elimination process when we deal with sex crimes." ..Source.. Daniel D'Ambrosio