Hillsborough attorney candidate disputes claims of harassment

By GRAHAM BRINK

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 7, 2000

Sharon Hammerberg says the last straw came in April 1998 during a conference of sex abuse investigators in Ocala. That's when a prosecutor she says had been harassing her for months sent flowers to the front desk of her hotel.

A sergeant attending the conference with Hammerberg, a Polk County sheriff's detective at the time, noticed something was wrong and told her to write a report about the prosecutor's behavior.

The report chronicled countless phone calls, beeper messages and flower deliveries from assistant state attorney Bill Jennings, a married man Hammerberg says she had no interest in knowing personally. The report characterized the conduct as harassment.

A week after the report found its way to Jennings' boss, State Attorney Jerry Hill in Polk County, Jennings resigned, saying he wanted to work closer to his home in Tampa. He took a job with the Hillsborough Public Defender's Office and two months ago announced his candidacy for state attorney in Hillsborough County.

This week, Jennings, 51, denied the account in Hammerberg's report and said it was the detective who pursued him. "I guess I exercised a lack of judgment in lending her an ear," he said. "I did nothing that could be construed as harassment."

But Hammerberg, 36, her ex-husband and a co-worker say it was Jennings who pursued Hammerberg, even after she asked him to stop.

Hammerberg's ex-husband, Polk Deputy Bob Kerr, remembered Jennings calling their home several nights a week. Kerr said his wife eventually urged him to say she wasn't home.

Katrina Crouse, who worked with Hammerberg, said Hammerberg felt harassed.

The report accused Jennings of asking Hammerberg to perform a search she thought would violate Sheriff's Office policy, and threatening to call her supervisors if she didn't take time off from a mandatory orientation program to help photograph a crime scene, something she said he didn't need her to do.

Jennings said he and Hammerberg often called and paged one another for work or to arrange to eat lunch, nothing unusual for a prosecutor and a detective working on cases together. He said the calls to her home came mostly after she had paged him.

Jennings said he gave roses cut from his garden and other flowers to Hammerberg and other women he worked with, and remembered giving her a stuffed dog as a humorous gift. He said accusations that he interfered with Hammerberg's work are "absurd." Jennings said he left potted tulips for Hammerberg at the front desk of the Ocala hotel as a "way of saying goodbye." He said he was fed up with Hammerberg pursuing him and wanted the tulips to be a parting gesture to signal that from then on the relationship would be strictly professional.

Hill, the state attorney, said he talked to Jennings about the report, and Jennings told him he hadn't done anything inappropriate. Jennings wrote his resignation letter about a week later, on May 2, 1998. "I did not ask him to do that," Hill said.

Jennings faces attorney Mark Ober in the Republican primary. The winner of that will face either incumbent State Attorney Harry Lee Coe or his Democratic challenger, Catherine Real, on Nov. 7.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.