Around midday on Sunday, November 18, 2001, a young woman, J.F., returned to her apartment in Thunderbolt, Georgia, just outside Savannah, to find a man burglarizing the apartment. The burglar, who was wearing baseball batting gloves, pushed her into the bedroom, stripped her naked, and tied her to a chair in a closet.
He covered her face and threatened her with a knife. He said he was a member of Al-Qaeda who had come to steal her computer. He told her he was taking her jewelry and some CDs as well, but only to “make it look like a robbery.” The assailant left for short periods, telling J.F. he needed to take her computer out of the apartment. The man warned J.F. not to try to escape because an accomplice, named Habib, was waiting outside the apartment. He said Habib was “sex crazy” and might rape and kill J.F. if he learned she was home.
At one point, J.F. heard the man speaking on her cordless telephone in a language she did not understand, ostensibly with Habib. She said that was fake because she heard the beeping sound that indicated the phone was not in use.
Eventually, the man untied J.F. and tied her to the bed. He then performed what he called a “fake rape,” which consisted of masturbating and forcing her hands to her pubic area. He performed oral sex on her and then ejaculated onto her. She felt the attacker wipe her body and the bed with a towel.
He left the apartment and when J.F. freed herself, she noted the time was 2:40 p.m. She saw that a number of items had been taken, including jewelry, a computer and floppy disks, CDs, a camera, telephones, an answering machine, and a big, Royal brand navy blue suitcase.
J.F. left and went to her parents’ home in Alabama without contacting the police. However, the next day, November 19, 2001, her parents notified Thunderbolt police. J.F. spoke to the police on the telephone and met them a week later.
The officers in charge of the investigation were Detective Henry Conners III and Chief Samuel O’Dwyer. They went to J.F.’s apartment where they dusted for fingerprints, retrieved the garbage, and took three towels from the bedroom. The towels were inspected by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and no semen was found, so no testing was done. No readable prints were found on the fingerprint cards.
The towels were tested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and no semen was found. No readable prints were found on the fingerprint lifts.
Meanwhile, a series of unrelated events were unfolding that eventually led police to 27-year-old Sandeep “Sonny” Bharadia and 31-year-old Sterling Flint.
This chain of events began on November 12, 2001, when Bharadia, who lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, near Atlanta, lent his Chevrolet Tahoe to an acquaintance, Shawn Overton. Overton failed to return the Tahoe as well as Bharadia’s phone calls over the next few days. Bharadia learned that Overton had driven the Tahoe to his mother’s home in Beaufort, South Carolina. Bharadia called police in Atlanta, and Beaufort and reported the Tahoe as stolen.
On Saturday, November 17, Bharadia used a friend’s car to take his girlfriend, Alicia Colbert, her daughter, and friend Kisha Pitts’s three daughters to a drive in movie in Atlanta. They went to see the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, at a drive-in theater in Atlanta.
When the movie ended about midnight, Bharadia brought Pitts’s daughters home and then spent the night at Colbert’s house.
On the morning of Sunday, November 18 – the day of the crime – police in Beaufort notified Bharadia that his Chevy Tahoe was at an impound lot, which was closed on Sunday and could not be picked up until Monday, November 19.
On Monday morning, Bharadia visited his parole officer where he obtained a permit to travel to Beaufort to get the Tahoe. At the time, Bharadia was on probation after pleading guilty to various car theft charges arising from involvement in a “chop shop.” Bharadia and another girlfriend, Raquel Edwards, drove Edwards’s Ford Explorer to Beaufort.
Bharadia and Edwards decided she should not drive back to Atlanta, a trip of nearly 300 miles, because Edwards’s driver’s license was suspended. So Bharadia called Flint, an acquaintance who mostly lived in Atlanta but also stayed frequently in Savannah with a friend named Ashleigh Dold.
At that time, Flint had an extensive criminal history, including multiple home burglaries, forgery, possession of tools for the commission of a crime, and giving a false name to law enforcement. In one of his prior convictions, Flint had burglarized the same Atlanta-area home three times in nine days, the last time arriving towing a U-Haul trailer. Dold lived on Betty Drive in Savannah.
Bharadia proposed that Flint drive the Tahoe back to Atlanta. They met at a restaurant in Savannah for dinner. Flint arrived riding a motorcycle while Dold arrived separately.
Eventually, they left for Atlanta. Flint drove the Tahoe, while Bharadia drove the Ford Explorer. Enroute, Flint called Dold, who had returned to her home separately, and told her to retrieve a computer from the U-Haul trailer, which was parked at Dold’s sisters house, which was about three blocks from the apartment complex where J.F. was attacked. Flint asked Dold to bring the computer to her home. Dold found the computer packed inside pieces of navy blue luggage and brought it all to her home.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 20, as Bharadia and Edwards in the Ford Explorer and Flint in the Tahoe neared Atlanta, Flint dropped out of sight. Over the next few days, Bharadia called Flint multiple times, asking him to return the Tahoe. In one call, Bharadia asked why he needed the Tahoe since he had a motorcycle. Flint replied that the motorcycle was stolen.
Bharadia called Flint’s mother and told her that if he did not return the Tahoe, police would be notified. Flint responded by calling Edwards, Bharadia’s girlfriend, to say that he knew where Bharadia’s parents lived and that he would kill Bharadia.
Bharadia filed two criminal complaints against Flint: on November 21 for stealing the Tahoe, and on November 23 for making terroristic threats.
Meanwhile, Flint was using the Tahoe to commit daytime burglaries in the Atlanta area. In the first one, the homeowner returned home and found a man he later identified as Flint walking up the staircase from the homeowner’s apartment. The homeowner noted the license plate of a Tahoe parked outside, and police determined it was Bharadia’s Tahoe. The homeowner confronted Flint, who was carrying CDs and the homeowner’s backpack. Flint fled, shouting out a warning to “John.” Inside, the homeowner found a second man, presumably “John,” who was in the process of stealing the homeowner’s computer. The man struck the homeowner and fled.
On November 26, a woman returned to her home in the early afternoon to find a sport utility vehicle, either a Suburban or a Tahoe, parked in her driveway. A man the woman later identified as Flint walked from behind the house carrying a backpack and offered to blow the leaves off the driveway. When the women declined, Flint got in the vehicle and drove away. The woman found her door had been forced open and that numerous items were piled together, including two boxes of CDs, a soda bottle full of coins, a DVD player, and a laptop computer.
By this time, police had learned that Bharadia was the owner of the Tahoe and had reported it stolen by Flint. And at about this time, the Tahoe was recovered by Atlanta police following a high-speed chase in which Flint crashed the vehicle, and managed to avoid capture by running away.
Police notified Bharadia that the Tahoe had been recovered. On November 27, Bharadia viewed a photographic lineup and identified Flint as the person who stole the Tahoe. Bharadia also told police that Flint had a stolen motorcycle that could be found at Dold’s home on Betty Drive.
On November 28, when Savannah police went to Dold’s house, they asked about the motorcycle. Dold pointed to other items Flint had left in her car and in her bedroom. These included J.F.’s computer, jewelry and CDs, as well as a knife, a tire iron, and a pair of baseball batting gloves that Dold said belonged to Flint.
The police notified Detective Conners they had found some items that may be of interest. Conners said he went to Dold’s home, and identified the items that belonged to J.F. That afternoon, Conners showed a photographic lineup to J.F. She identified Flint and another man as possibly being her attacker, but said she was “not positive about either one.”
Detective Conners later said that he began to suspect Bharadia was involved in the attack on J.F. because Dold had told him that J.F.’s computer had been loaded into Bharadia’s Tahoe. Dold would later deny telling Conners that the Tahoe was used to transport J.F.’s stolen goods and admit that she used her vehicle, a Chevrolet Cavalier, to tow the trailer and move J.F.’s computer.
As a result, Conners prepared another photographic lineup. When J.F. viewed it, she identified Bharadia as her attacker. This photographic array later disappeared. On November 30, 2001, Bharadia was arrested for the attack on J.F.
Bharadia did not resemble J.F.’s initial description. The photo of him used in the lineup was five years old, showed him with close-cropped hair and a mustache. When arrested, Bharadia was clean-shaven and had long hair. He was not dark-skinned as J.F. had described, and he was of South Asian descent, not a Black man as J.F. had reported.
Flint was arrested on December 2, following a high-speed chase that ended when he crashed the Dodge Caravan he was driving. He was charged with the burglaries committed while using the Tahoe.
On December 7, 2001, the day Bharadia was arraigned, he, along with his attorney, Michael Schiavone, sat for an interview with Detective Conners. A prosecutor who was never identified in any documents was present as well. Conners would later testify that during this interview, Bharadia admitted that Flint had used the Tahoe for loading “computers and stuff” at Dodd’s house.
In May 2002, after a preliminary hearing had been held and Bharadia had been bound over for indictment, Bharadia’s family hired a new attorney, Caleb Banks. He did not consult with Schiavone and did little else to prepare for trial. He did visit the Thunderbolt police department. By that time, Conners was no longer on the force. He had resigned days earlier citing “the lack of [i]ntegrity and severe mismanagement that dominates the Thunderbolt Police Department.”
However, the case file was locked in Conners’s desk. Chief O’Dwyer did show some records to Banks, including the photo lineup from which J.F. had identified Bharadia. Years later, Banks recalled laughing with O’Dwyer about the suggestive nature of the lineup. “And we laughed about it,” Banks said. “It’s the sorriest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Mr. Bharadia’s picture jumps off the page at me. One of the guys has only got one eye...everybody looked Hispanic to me…[Bharadia]…just jumps off the page at you. No doubt about who he is.”
Banks sensed O’Dwyer was uncomfortable, especially after he said Banks could not see anything else unless he complied with proper procedures. By the time Banks filed a motion for discovery and preservation of evidence on June 20, 2002, the photo array had disappeared and would never be seen again.
On July 31, 2002, Chief O’Dwyer resigned rather than be fired after an administrative law judge affirmed the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council’s revocation of O’Dwyer’s police certification. The ruling stemmed from events in 1994 when O’Dwyer was a narcotics investigator. According to the findings, O’Dwyer had perjured himself before a grand jury and encouraged a confidential informant to do so as well.
In March 2003, Bharadia was indicted by a Chatham County grand jury on charges of burglary, aggravated sodomy, aggravated sexual battery, and theft by receiving. Flint also was indicted, but only for burglary and theft by receiving. He pled guilty to the theft by receiving charge and agreed to testify against Bharadia.
In June 2003, when the prosecution finally provided discovery to Banks, both photo arrays were no longer part of the file. Nor was there a copy of the recording of Conners’s interview with Bharadia.
Banks did not file any pre-trial motions to challenge J.F.’s identification or the make-up of the photo array. He did not seek to present an expert witness on eyewitness identification because he erroneously thought it was not allowed.
Banks subpoenaed a number of witnesses, but did not interview them prior to the trial. He said he couldn’t find Raquel Edwards, with whom Bharadia had spent most of his time on the day of the crime, but she would later say the contact information Bharadia had given Banks was correct and she was unaware of any attempt to find her. When the trial began on June 26, 2003, Alicia Colbert was there to provide moral support for Bharadia, not realizing she would be called as a defense witness the next day.
From the beginning, Bharadia had denied involvement in the crime. During his first meeting with Banks, Bharadia had shared his account of his whereabouts on the day before, the day of, and the days after the crime, providing names of people he said could verify his account. Bharadia also claimed that he never said anything during his interview with Detective Conners except that he had nothing to do with the crime, and that he provided information about his whereabouts.
Banks would later claim he sent an investigator to Atlanta to check out Bharadia’s information, but the investigator couldn’t find anything or anyone and didn’t file a report.
On June 8, 2003, shortly before testifying at Bharadia’s trial, Detective Conners was arrested for misdemeanor battery on his wife.
The trial began on June 26, 2003, in Chatham County Superior Court. J.F. testified about the burglary and attack. She identified several items of evidence, including a pair of batting gloves that had been worn by the perpetrator and the knife the perpetrator had held against her throat. When the prosecutor asked J.F. about the photo array that included Bharadia’s photo, she said: “When I saw the defendant’s face in the photo lineup, I automatically knew that was who it was. [ . . .] Without any doubt whatsoever.”
On cross-examination, J.F. acknowledged that she had in fact seen an earlier photo array that included photos of six Black men, and that she identified two people in the first array — one of whom was Flint — but was “not positive about either one.”
During re-direct examination, she pointed to Bharadia, saying she had “not a doubt…those are his eyes. I’ll never forget them.”
Detective Conners testified that Bharadia had said that J.F.'s computer was loaded into the Tahoe. And he suggested that Flint had implicated Bharadia in the crime. When Detective Conners was asked when he first suspected the property found at Dold’s house came from someone other than Flint, he began to talk about his interview with Flint (for which, like his interview with Bharadia, there was no record). The judge cut him off and instructed him not to testify about what Flint told him. Detective Conners also testified that his interview with Bharadia was video and audio recorded. But he said he did not put the recording into evidence, and he did not know where they were.
Banks did not ask Conners about the pending domestic violence charge, even though the trial judge had denied a prosecution motion to prevent him from doing so.
Banks also failed to question Conners about whether the police had made any effort to verify any of the alibi evidence that Bharadia had provided, or why they had not done so. Banks also asked no questions regarding the police’s investigation into Flint; Flint’s similar past crimes; his lack of alibi for the date and time of the crime; or the fact that Dold’s sister’s house, where Flint was storing his stolen U-Haul trailer, was within walking distance of the crime scene. He also did not attempt to show that Flint had a strong motive to seek revenge against Bharadia, who had played a key role in Flint’s capture for the Atlanta burglaries.
Barbara Retzer, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation biologist, testified that she did not detect any seminal fluid on the towels, so did not perform further testing.
Flint testified that Bharadia asked him to hold some items, including a computer. He said he knew the property was stolen and that Bharadia intended to sell it. He said he had pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the prosecution.
During cross-examination, Flint claimed he had purchased the stolen motorcycle from Bharadia and that Bharadia had provided the U-Haul.
Banks asked Flint about the burglaries and Flint said he had no pending charges, that the cases had been disposed of. In fact, Flint had pled guilty. Because Banks had not investigated, he could not impeach Flint’s misleading testimony, he could not show that Flint had been convicted of burglaries that were similar to the burglary at J.F.'s apartment, and he did not attempt to show that police identified Flint because of Bharadia’s efforts.
Flint lied about taking the Tahoe and denied that he crashed it following a police chase. Banks attempted to impeach Flint about the crash, but used the police reports of the Dodge Caravan crash by mistake. The prosecution did not attempt to correct any of Flint’s false testimony.
Banks called police from Beaufort who testified that the Tahoe was towed to the impound lot on November 17 and was released to Bharadia on the afternoon of November 19.
Keisha Pitts testified that Bharadia took her daughter and another child to the new Harry Potter movie on Saturday, November 17, 2001, and brought them home about 12 or 1 a.m. She said Bharadia returned to her house about 9 am on November 18, borrowed some tools, and brought them back at 5 or 6 p.m.
To her surprise, Colbert was called to testify. She said she and Bharadia saw the Harry Potter movie and spent Saturday night in her house. She said the following day, he dropped her at work sometime between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Because she was unprepared to testify, she got confused about the dates and said several times that they saw the movie two weekends before Thanksgiving, on November 10 and 11, rather than November 17 and 18.
The movie had been first released on Friday, November 16, making it impossible to have seen it two weeks before Thanksgiving. Banks did not present any evidence to establish the release date of the movie.
Dold testified that she and Flint brought the U-Haul to Savannah from Atlanta, unloaded it at her house, and then took it to her sister’s house in Thunderbolt. She said that on the day of the crime, Flint dropped her at work at noon and picked her up at 6:30 p.m. She said that she had retrieved the computer and blue luggage from the trailer, which was a five-minute walk from J.F.’s apartment, because Flint asked her to do so.
Bharadia testified and denied involvement in the crime. He detailed his whereabouts and said he was at least 250 miles away from J.F.’s apartment at the time of the crime. He testified about how he had filed charges against Flint for stealing the Tahoe and making terroristic threats.
Prior to the jury beginning deliberations, the trial judge acquitted Bharadia of the theft by receiving stolen property. On June 27, 2003, after 73 minutes, the jury convicted Bharadia of burglary, aggravated sodomy, and aggravated sexual battery. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In August 2003, Detective Conners resigned from the force to avoid being terminated. In November 2003, he pled guilty to the domestic battery charge and subsequently his certification as a police officer was revoked.
Attorney Steven Sparger was appointed to handle Bharadia’s appeal. Coincidentally, he met Aimee Maxwell, then executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project. She recommended that he obtain DNA testing. Sparger met with the trial judge and was granted funds to have DNA tests performed.
The physical evidence in the case and a blood sample from Bharadia were sent to Forensic Science Associates, a laboratory run by Dr. Edward Blake. On November 16, 2004, Blake reported that an unknown male profile was found on the batting gloves and that Bharadia was eliminated as the source of that DNA.
Sparger went to court and asked that a reference sample from Flint be sent to Blake. The prosecution objected, and the judge denied the request. This occurred at a conference in the judge’s chambers and was not recorded. Sparer did not file a written motion for a reference sample.
Sparger also consulted with an eyewitness identification expert, Dr. Steven Cole, who concluded that J.F.’s identification of Bharadia was unreliable for several reasons, including that the victim was white and Bharadia was Asian and her initial description said her attacker was a black man.
Sparger filed a motion for a new trial based on the DNA testing and Cole’s report. He did not raise the denial of the request for a sample from Flint. And when the motion for a new trial was denied, Sparger did not appeal the denial of the request for a sample from Flint.
In November 2006, the Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed Bharadia’s convictions.
In 2011, another motion for further DNA testing was granted. In April 2012, the unknown male profile on the batting gloves was identified as belonging to Flint after the unknown profile was run through the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). A motion for a new trial was denied, however, when the court ruled that Bharadia should have obtained this evidence prior to his trial in 2003.
Sparger and the Georgia Innocence Project appealed. In 2014, the Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed the denial. The court concluded that Bharadia and his counsel did not exercise due diligence because they took no steps to seek DNA testing on the gloves before trial. In 2015, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the ruling.
In December 2022, Bharadia’s legal team, now including attorney Christina Cribbs and Olivia Vigiletti from the Georgia Innocence Project and attorneys Holly Pierson, John Fleming, and Anna Halsey, filed an amended petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The petition cited several grounds of ineffective assistance by Sparger, Bharadia’s appeals attorney, as well a claim of actual innocence.
A hearing was held in June 2023. On April 5, 2024, Judge Laura Tate granted the petition, vacated Bharadia’s convictions, and ordered a new trial.
“If appellate counsel had not been deficient…Mr. Bharadia's motion for new trial and appeal would have changed,” Judge Tate ruled. She said that the DNA results excluding Bharadia and identifying Flint would have been with a showing that the procedures requirements had been met. Moreover, the trial court “would have found that the victim’s out-of-court identification of Mr. Bharadia was inadmissible due the State’s destruction of the photo lineup and because the lineup was impermissibly suggestive.”
In addition, the judge said that the trial court “would have found that the State presented false evidence…that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to impeach prosecution witnesses, for failing to adequately present Mr. Bharadia’s alibi defense; and ….that the State suppressed material, exculpatory evidence.”
On August 29, 2024, Bharadia was released on bond, more than 21 years after his conviction.
On May 16, 2025, the prosecution dismissed the case.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 05-30-2025
Last Update Date: 05-30-2025
