A 26-year-old Santa Ana butcher was sentenced today to 25 years to life in state prison for nearly killing a Fountain Valley man with a machete and having conspired with the victim's wife and lover to commit murder.
As Antonio Cinco Ortega is measured for his prison jumpsuit, the victim's 50-year-old wife and her boyfriend and former tenant await their trials.
]
Ortega, who worked at a Huntington Beach grocery store, was a close friend of 42-year-old Michael
Calvin Shores II, an unemployed security guard who was renting a room at the Fountain Valley home of Frank Richard Sharpski, his wife Mary Katheryn Sharpski and their three children.
According to the Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA), Frank
Sharpski abused his wife physically and emotionally, so much so that she
was drawn to Shores, they became lovers and they hatched a plan to make
it appear an intruder killed Frank. The lovers are accused of hiring Ortega to slice up Frank for $5,000.
Despite Frank's nose
nearly being sliced off, his skull being fractured and a thumb and two
fingers being severed, he survived his March 2009 attack. A jury in Santa Ana convicted Ortega Nov. 1 on felony counts of mayhem, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted
murder with premeditation and deliberation, with
sentencing enhancements for great bodily injury and the personal use of a
deadly weapon.
Shores and Mary Sharpski are each charged with felony counts of mayhem, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder, with a
sentencing enhancement for great bodily injury. Convictions could send them to prison for life. They have an April 12 court hearing set.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.