Man Pleads Guilty To Sexually Assaulting Disabled Woman

HARTFORD — A former job coach for Goodwill pleaded guilty Monday to sexually assaulting a developmentally disabled woman who was in his care.

Kenneth Wilson, 40, pleaded guilty to a single count of second-degree sexual assault as part of a plea agreement. He will spend 4 1/2 years in prison, be on probation for 10 years and have to register for life as a sex offender.

Prosecutor Rick Rubino told Judge Joan K. Alexander that the victim’s family was satisfied with the agreement because it would allow her to avoid testifying at a trial. Wilson did not have a criminal record before his arrest on several counts of sexually assaulting the 22-year-old woman.

Wilson drove the woman and others who received services from the state Department of Developmental Services to jobs and helped them perform those jobs.

Manchester police arrested Wilson in June and charged him with eight counts of second-degree sexual assault. The charges are under a section of the law about victims unable to consent to sex.

East Hartford police charged Wilson with first-degree sexual assault, contending that he used threats and force to have sex with the woman.

The 22-year-old victim was described by police as having mild mental retardation. She lives in a group home in Manchester under the care of the state Department of Developmental Services. Police cited records that said the woman has the mental ability of a young teenager and was “unable to avoid being taken advantage of sexually.”

Beginning last summer, the woman joined a vocational program run by Goodwill of Western and Northern Connecticut. She and others were transported to stores in the Manchester and East Hartford area, where they arranged magazine racks, police said. Wilson was the woman’s job coach and also the driver of the van that transported the employees.

Wilson began persuading the woman to have sex with him last year, soon after she joined the Goodwill program, police said. Over several months, police say, Wilson sexually assaulted her in a van parked at a Stop & Shop supermarket in Manchester and other store parking lots, in his home in East Hartford, at his girlfriend’s home in Bloomfield and in women’s bathrooms at stores where she was assigned to work.

Although the victim told Wilson she did not want to have sex, the victim said Wilson would threaten to hit her if she did not comply and also plied her with drugs and alcohol, police said.

In February, the victim told a manager at her group home about the abuse, police said. She was brought to Manchester Memorial Hospital, where a criminal investigation began. Goodwill fired Wilson after completing its own investigation, according to a statement from the nonprofit organization.

When East Hartford investigators confronted him about the allegations, Wilson at first denied having sex with the woman but then said that he and she had consensual sex in 2011, police said.