In Connecticut, a Paroled Serial Rapist Is Met With a Wave of Fear and Anger

Sitting in a family room here filled with her daughters’ toys, Edy McClure glanced at the evening news on Monday night. She heard the name of her town — a normally quiet suburb that is known for its good schools. Then she heard her street — Fox Run Drive, where basketball hoops and bicycles dot the driveways and broad lawns.

A serial rapist, in prison for 24 years, would be moving into the neighborhood after his release on Friday. Mrs. McClure thought of her daughters, ages 4 and 8. “I just freaked out,” she said.

So did many of her neighbors. But despite their concerns, and the efforts of the governor and the attorney general of Connecticut to keep him confined, the convicted rapist, David Pollitt, 54, moved here on Friday amid a sea of television cameras and a crowd of disgruntled neighbors, several of them in tears.

It was only on Monday that most of them learned that Mr. Pollitt, who had been imprisoned for the rapes of at least five women in five towns in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was to move in with his sister, Janice Rosengren, and her family after other relatives spurned him.