Toledo man faces execution

November 16, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

Gregory Bryant-Bey

TOLEDO (AP) — Staring at the body sprawled on a parking lot, the police detective’s mind flashed back to an unresolved killing a few months earlier.

The circumstances were eerily the same — the pants of both men had been removed and their shoes had been taken off and placed next to their bodies.

Both had been stabbed in the chest.

Those similarities, along with a bloody palm print found at one of the murder scenes 16 years ago, led to convictions against Gregory Bryant-Bey. He now faces execution Wednesday by lethal injection.

Bryant-Bey, 53, has been on death row since 1993. He is in line to be the second Ohio inmate put to death this year after last month’s execution of double-murderer Richard Cooey.

After about a year without any executions in Ohio, more are expected to be carried out in the next year.

The state had one of the nation’s busiest death chambers before an unofficial moratorium on executions that began last year while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky’s lethal injection procedure.

Bryant-Bey twice faced death-penalty trials after he was arrested after the stabbing of Peter Mihas, owner of The Board Room restaurant in downtown Toledo.

Police caught up with him after a hotel clerk tipped them off that Bryant-Bey suddenly had a wad of cash. The clerk was suspicious because he knew the man had been panhandling on the streets.

Bryant-Bey quickly admitted to killing Mihas, who was attacked in his restaurant parking lot just after closing Nov. 2, 1992. Police found an empty money bag next to his body.

But Bryant-Bey denied any involvement in the stabbing of collectibles store owner Dale Pinkelman three months earlier.

Pinkelman, like Mihas, was stabbed in the chest and left without his shoes and pants. Prosecutors later suggested that Bryant-Bey took off his victims’ pants so that he could more easily clean out the money in their pockets.

Pinkelman was found dead in the back of his store where he sold baseball cards, coins and watches.

“His life was taken by a man who had so little value for life that he was willing to kill my father for less than $200,” Kelly Clark, Pinkelman’s daughter, told Ohio Parole Board members.

Bryant-Bey escaped the death penalty the first time when jurors decided to give him a life sentence in the stabbing of Mihas.

Before the sentencing, Bryant-Bey apologized to the victim’s family.

“My life has been nothing but a struggle, and this is where it has gotten me,” he said.

The death sentence that Mihas’ family had hoped for didn’t come until six months later, when Bryant-Bey was convicted in Pinkelman’s death and sentenced to die.

During that trial, prosecutors introduced evidence from the Mihas trial to show the likelihood he committed both killings.

Bryant-Bey’s attorneys have done little to dispute his guilt while making a plea for clemency. Instead, they have noted his troubled childhood and abandonment by his mother at a young age.