Guilty plea:
Monte P. White pleads guilty to breaking into the homes of two New London women in 2017 and sexually assaulting them.
Monte P. White decided to plead guilty Tuesday as a jury assembled in New London Superior Court to hear testimony from the first of two young women who said he broke into their New London homes while they slept and sexually assaulted them in October and November 2017.
White, 35, will be sentenced Jan. 28 to 20 years in prison for two counts of first-degree sexual assault and for an unrelated sale of narcotics charge.
The trial was scheduled to begin before Judge Hunchu Kwak.
White had notified the court late Tuesday that he wanted to “fire” his appointed attorney, Matthew G. Berger, but decided instead to resolve his case, which included DNA evidence and fingerprints that implicated him in the crimes.
The first victim was ready to testify and was waiting outside the courtroom when White met with his brother and sister in the basement lockup area and decided he would take the plea offer from prosecutor Theresa Anne Ferryman that he had initially turned down.
He will be sentenced Jan. 28 to 40 years in prison, suspended after 20 years served, followed by 10 years of strict probation. Should he violate any of the terms of probation, he would be subject to serving the remaining 20 years of his sentence that was suspended.
Judge Hillary B. Strackbein explained to him that if he had been convicted of all the crimes with which he was initially charged, including two counts of home invasion, he would have been exposed to 136 years in prison. White is charged with a similar crime in Torrington that will be resolved separately.
According to New London police, White broke into homes on Hawthorne Drive in October 2017 and Nautilus Drive in November 2017 and violently sexually assaulted two women he didn’t know. Both women said they were awakened by a man in their bedroom who held a gun to the back of their head, or threatened use of a gun, and sexually assaulted them. Fingerprint impressions lifted from a sliding glass door also implicated White in the Nautilus Drive crime, police said.
Police said DNA swabs taken during a forensic examination of the female victims matched DNA from White, whose genetic material is in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database. DNA samples are taken from all convicted felons in Connecticut, and White pleaded guilty to a felony drug possession charge in 2010.