Frank J. Ronghi Staff Sergeant U. S. Army Convicted Sex Offender Rape Sodomy Murder Of A Child

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Name: Frank J. Ronghi

U.S. V. Ronghi

Date Of Conviction: July 2000

Plea: Guilty

Charges: Rape, sodomy and murder of a child

Military Branch: U.S. Army

Listed In National Sex Offenders Registry? No

Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, 36, of Niles, Ohio, entered the plea late Friday at the request of his defense lawyer and will be sentenced Monday, the day his trial was to start, said Hilda Patton, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army’s 5th Corps.

He pleaded guilty to charges of murder, forcible sodomy and three counts of indecent acts with an 11-year-old child, Merita Shabiu. Her bruised and slashed body was found in the snow on January 13, 1999 outside Vitina, where Sergeant Ronghi's company was based. Sergeant Ronghi has said he sodomized and murdered Merita in an abandoned building in Vitina, before stuffing her body in a plastic bag and dumping it in the woods.

There was also evidence that he had planned the killing. A prosecutor, Capt. Alton Gwaltney, citing testimony from a fellow soldier, said Sergeant Ronghi had told other soldiers that he had a plan to ''grab a little girl and rape her, but would have to kill her to get away with it and would blame the Serbs.''

But prosecutors, without explanation, dropped different charges of sodomy, murder and rape during the two-hour session led by a U.S. Army judge, Col. Kenneth Clavenger.

The court martial held in Germany saw the military court sentence Ronghi to life in prison without parole for the murder of an 11-year-old Kosovo Albanian girl.

Internal U.S. Army documents show that Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, 36, a native of Ohio now serving a life sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., bragged to Army subordinates that he engaged in sex acts with Haitian children even before his deployment to Europe last year. But, according to the Pentagon, no one reported the statements, and authorities began to investigate the reports only after the paratrooper was arrested in this case.

The investigation found that Ronghi, a weapons squad leader, and other squad members routinely grabbed and

otherwise harassed young women while on patrol in Kosovo. It also found that Ronghi had boasted of molesting children in Haiti and Saudi Arabia. The 12-year Army veteran served with the 101st Airborne Division in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991 and with the 82nd Airborne Division on a peacekeeping mission to Haiti

in 1997, Pentagon records show.

Another member of Ronghi's company in Kosovo, Spc. Randy Wineland, told investigators in a sworn statement

that Ronghi ``would brag about what he had done while deployed to Saudi Arabia and Haiti.'' ``In Haiti Staff Sgt. Ronghi talked about a 9-year-old girl,

Another fellow serviced member said that Staff Sgt. Ronghi said he took two little girls in Haiti while they served there to an empty building and he made the older girl sit in the corner and watch as he had sex with the younger sister. Then he said he made them switch places and he then had sex with the older girl.' The specialist said he never told anyone about the remarks because he didn't believe Ronghi.

Also in Kosovo, another soldier said that Ronghi, on his arrival in Europe, told a group of servicemen ``that in a Third

World country you could easily get away with raping someone, disposing of them and you wouldn't get caught.'' It was not until Ronghi bragged about the Haiti rapes while he was disposing of the body of the young Kosovo girl that the allegations began to filter up the chain of command.

Ronghi told a subordinate of his exploits elsewhere when he asked the subordinate to accompany him in an armored

vehicle to a remote location where he disposed of the girl's body on January 12, 1999. He allegedly threatened the soldier, Pfc. Michael Stegemoller, with death if he told. Stegemoller swiftly notified superiors in Kosovo and led them to the girl's burial site. The private told investigators that a rattled Ronghi told him as he disposed of the body, ``I also did

it a couple times in Saudi. It is easy to get away with things in a Third World country.''