Choking back tears and sobbing into his hands, a founder of a publicly funded school for some of D.C.’s most vulnerable students apologized for his role in a computer-theft ring and begged for mercy moments before being sent to prison for a year.
Charles Emor asked for a five-minute recess before telling U.S. District Judge James Robertson that he regretted buying dozens of computers stolen from a Gateway loading dock in Hampton, Va.
“I apologize to the community,” Emor said. “I knew better.”
Emor said he was hoping to avoid prison time for his role in the theft ring and pointed to his founding of the SunRise Academy, a publicly funded school that teaches up to 160 mentally and emotionally disturbed young men and boys from the public schools.
But Robertson was unmoved. He told Emor that his relationship with SunRise made his crime worse because he was putting himself out as a role model.
“I don’t know what you tell those young men when you see them,” Robertson told Emor. “But I hope it’s that actions have consequences.”
Thursday’s sentence was only the beginning of Emor’s troubles. He now faces deportation to his native Nigeria. Robertson accused Emor of lying about his origins — he told one probation officer that he was born and educated in the Virgin Islands — to avoid deportation.
SunRise’s future is also cloudy. Though a private school, it receives nearly all of its funding from the government. The academy has been paid $20 million in public funds since 1999.
Academy officials did not respond to requests for comment.
D.C. Public Schools pays hundreds of millions of dollars each year to vendors to educate about 2,000 disabled children. Auditors hired by Mayor Adrian Fenty to find out what’s wrong in the schools have told the administration that the $114 million “nonpublic” tuition program ought to be scrapped, sources told The Examiner.
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