7 years later, family mourns Victim’s kin says release isn’t fair

The victim’s fiancé had hoped the woman would get a life sentence.

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — More than seven years after Charise Harmon’s death from a gunshot wound, her family still mourns her passing and struggles to carry on with irreparably altered lives.

Their grief is compounded by their feeling that justice wasn’t served by the release of Harmon’s killer, Danielle Kramer of Austintown, who served just over seven years of combined county jail and state prison time.

“We don’t get to see her every day. When we come home from school, we don’t get to show her our report cards or our trophies,” said Javontae Wallace, 13, of Youngstown, one of Harmon’s five children.

Javontae is an accomplished football player, who brings home several trophies a year and aspires to be a professional football player. If he can’t fulfill his goal of joining the National Football League, Javontae said he wants to be a police officer.

The loss of their mother is especially painful for Javontae and three of his siblings: Shaquala Harmon, 14, of Youngstown; and Brian C. McClain Jr., 11, and Kavon McClain, 9, both of Campbell.

All four children witnessed the shooting as they sat in their mother’s car at the ages of 5, 6, 3 and 2, respectively, on May 24, 2000. Harmon’s fifth child, Shaniqua Wallace, now 17 and living in Columbus, was not present at the shooting scene outside an East Side convenience store.

Kramer told police she was driving her car about 7:20 p.m. in the 1300 block of Shehy Street when she struck and heavily damaged the door of Harmon’s parked car, as Harmon, then 25 and living on Dignan Street, was opening it.

After Kramer stopped, Harmon threatened to beat Kramer up if Kramer didn’t have a driver’s license, reached into Kramer’s car after Kramer replied she did have a driver’s license, punched Kramer, pulled her hair and grabbed her car keys as she sat in her car, Kramer told police.

As she left the car, Kramer told police she grabbed from beneath her driver’s seat a .38-caliber pistol she had obtained for defense against her violent boyfriend, and the gun discharged as the struggle continued.

Harmon ran into the nearby convenience store, said she had been shot and needed help, collapsed and died within minutes at the scene after suffering a single gunshot wound to the chest, according to Youngstown Police and Mahoning County coroner’s reports.

After being treated for cuts and bruises on her hands and arms and a black and blue left eye, Kramer was jailed that evening on a murder charge.

A county grand jury indicted Kramer, then 27, on the murder charge, carrying a penalty of 15 years to life in prison, but she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and was released Aug. 7 after seven years and 68 days of incarceration.

Kramer, now 35, asserted a self-defense claim in an unsuccessful plea withdrawal attempt in 2001.

“If she wouldn’t have had that gun, we wouldn’t have gone through what we’re going through now,” said Brian C. McClain Sr. of Campbell, Harmon’s fiancé and the father of Brian Jr. and Kavon, who live with him. Javontae and Shaquala live with their grandmother.

“They were deprived of their childhood,” McClain said of the children, talking in his bilevel house in a quiet residential neighborhood. “I spend more time working than I do being able to raise my kids,” said McClain, a delivery driver and the family’s sole provider.

Charise Harmon worked as a manufacturing laborer. The absence of their mother has forced the children to assume a disproportionate share of household chores at young ages to help their father, McClain noted.

“If I do have enough money to take them to the [amusement] park. I don’t have the time to take them to the park because I’m so busy working,” McClain lamented. “I just wish that their mother could be here to see the love that she instilled in her kids.”

Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court called Harmon’s death “a profound tragedy” and expressed sympathy to McClain and the Harmon family.

The judge added, however, “[Kramer] used deadly force against [Harmon] because the victim incited her into using deadly force” by threatening her, punching her and grabbing her hair.

“I can’t stand the thought that I had a hand in taking somebody’s life,” Kramer told the judge.

Kramer declined to be interviewed, but a letter written by then-state Rep. Kenneth A. Carano, which unsuccessfully sought Kramer’s release from prison late in 2003, described Kramer as a good student at Austintown Fitch High School, where Carano was one of her teachers.

Kramer, who also was a student aide to Carano, grew up in a single-parent home after her father left when she was very young, and her mother worked at menial jobs to support the family, Carano wrote to Judge Krichbaum.

Carano, who helped secure Kramer’s release this year, wrote that Kramer lost self-esteem and associated with a “negative social group” after her high school graduation. He wrote that she can be “a viable member of this society,” and that he would help her get a job after prison.

Kramer, who had worked at a truck stop and a car dealership before her arrest, was a groundskeeper and plumber at the Trumbull Correctional Institution, where she completed a computer training program.

McClain and Harmon’s brother, Andre, say Kramer’s release after such a short sentence was an injustice.

“She had no regard for life, but now she wants somebody to have regard for her life. I know she saw those kids in that car,” McClain said.

During the court hearing the day Kramer was released from prison, McClain opposed Kramer’s release, saying Kramer shot Harmon “in cold blood” in front of Harmon’s children.

McClain said he preferred a life sentence for Kramer. “I see drug dealers getting more than seven years,” he observed.

Andre Harmon added: “This girl took my sister’s life. My sister can never see another day in her life, but she only got seven years ... God knows it isn’t right, but he’ll handle it.”

Despite the unfairness they perceive in the handling of Kramer’s case, the family is guarded about the children’s measure of the incident.

“We try to show our kids not to have animosity toward anybody,” McClain said. “I try not to have them hate anybody.”

milliken@vindy.com