A Sharon man was sentenced Friday in Mercer County Common Pleas Court for stealing over $500,000 from 16 people, including several area senior citizens.

Michael W. Klingensmith, 35, was sentenced to 6èto 14 years in prison by Mercer County Court Judge Thomas R. Dobson who ordered him to pay $576,000 in restitution to his victims, said Sean Connolly, press secretary for the state Attorney General's Office. Klingensmith faced a maximum prison term of 135 years.

Klingensmith pleaded guilty in June to 28 counts of theft and deceptive business practices before Mercer County Court Judge Francis J. Fornelli.

State prosecutors began investigating Klingensmith in 1996 after a referral from District Attorney James P. Epstein. Local investigators realized Klingensmith's victims lived in several counties, according to a June news release from the attorney general's office.

Klingensmith sold water filtration systems to people and then charged them for costly repairs and replacement parts. He also convinced victims to give him money for a hot tub business he was attempting to start, the release said.

Klingensmith defrauded 16 individuals, 10 of whom were over 60 years old, of $550,000 and used the money at Ladbroke's off-track betting parlor in Union Township, Lawrence County, the release said. Though he won $154,567 in 1999 and $149,154 from January to June 2000, he lost nearly $900,000 during that period, the release said.

Klingensmith's local victims included a Sharon woman, who gave him a total of $123,000 between December 1996 and May 2000 for a water filtration system that was never hooked up and his hot tub business; a Sharon woman who took out loans at his insistence and gave him $22,136 between 1997 and May 2000 for a water system that did not work; a Sharpsville man, who gave him $2,700 on Oct. 25 for two water conditioning systems and a Clark man, who gave him $17,800 in November 1998 for a hot tub that was never installed.