Ferry deputy quits amid probe by FBI

A Ferry County sheriff’s detective who is under investigation by the FBI resigned Friday to avoid being fired.

Sheriff Pete Warner had given Detective Carroll Sharp Jr. until Friday to submit his resignation. Warner said Sharp gave his notice verbally and promised a letter by Tuesday.

“This was dragging on too long, and he needed to get on with his life,” Warner said. “I’m going to accept his resignation, and that’s the end to it.”

It’s not the end, however, to an FBI investigation into Sharp’s personal relationship with several troubled teenage boys.

A 15-year-old boy who lived in Sharp’s home for several months in late 2002 accused Sharp of touching him inappropriately during informal wrestling sessions. A Washington State Patrol investigation concluded that the boy wasn’t a credible witness, but an ongoing FBI investigation has turned up allegations by a second boy, according to Warner.

Despite the WSP investigation, Sharp took another troubled 15-year-old boy into his home. The boy was still living there on Feb. 28 when Warner placed Sharp on paid leave for further criminal and internal affairs investigations.

Sharp, a 36-year-old bachelor, has said there was nothing improper about his relationship with those boys and others.

Nor was there any conflict of interest, he said in February, when he investigated allegations against a boy who had been his houseguest, or when he urged a deputy prosecutor not to bring assault charges against another teenager who was a friend of the second boy who lived with him.

Sharp gained statewide attention in February 2005 when he was credited with saving a state Division of Child and Family Services social worker. The detective fatally shot a 35-year-old man who had attacked social worker Edith Vance with a machete.

Vance and another social worker had gone to the man’s home – two old buses in a remote area six miles northeast of Curlew – to remove his children. Vance suffered a broken wrist, a head injury, and cuts on her arms and shoulders.

Sharp previously had earned praise for work that resulted in the identification of a San Francisco murder victim in November 2000, 20 years after the victim disappeared and nine years after her bones were found in northern Ferry County.