Man gets prison term in drowning of boy, 15
By Ed Runyan
The victim’s mother came from Japan for the sentencing.
YOUNGSTOWN — David Sharpe, the 46-year-old Pyatt Street man who pleaded guilty to reckless homicide in the drowning and dismemberment of 15-year-old Jimmie P. Higham, has been sentenced to 71‚Ñ2 years in prison.
Sharpe said nothing during the hearing Thursday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, while the boy’s father, James Higham Jr., and the boy’s mother, Yumi Nagi, told Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of the sadness they feel over the boy’s death in 2001.
“I would like to kiss him goodbye and thank him for coming into my life as my son,” said Nagi, who flew to the United States from Japan for the hearing.
Nagi said it appeared that Sharpe showed no remorse for his part in the boy’s death.
“Some day, the crime you have committed will terrorize you, and then maybe you will regret what you have done,” she said.
She said she will never forgive Sharpe, who was living with the boy and Sharpe’s girlfriend, Jennifer L. Snyder, at a house on Manchester Avenue when the boy died around June 15, 2001. His death occurred during a domestic dispute at the house, authorities said.
Police believe the boy drowned in the bathtub during the dispute.
Nagi said she wishes she could hold and touch her son, but she also wishes she could know what his last words were and what exactly took place when he died.
Snyder, who was sentenced to four years in prison for her role in the boy’s death, is a sister of the boy’s father’s second wife.
Snyder eventually reported the boy missing about six months after he died, police said. Based on her statement to police in late 2007, police charged Sharpe with murder.
The boy’s body was dismembered and disposed of in trash bins on the city’s South and West sides and ended up in the Carbon Limestone landfill in Poland, where it would be nearly impossible to find, prosecutors say.
Not having a body would have made prosecuting Sharpe for murder difficult, said Robert E. Bush Jr., chief of the criminal division of the county prosecutor’s office.
Sharpe received the maximum sentence for reckless homicide, attempted tampering with evidence and gross abuse of a corpse.
James Higham Jr. said he spent 19 months in an institution after his son’s death, trying to recover from the strain.
“This whole thing has destroyed my life,” he said. “It’s something I can’t get out of my head.”
He added, “I feel it’s bad enough he killed my son. The fact that he mutilated the body doesn’t seem right. I don’t know how you could murder somebody and cut up their body parts and put them in a Dumpster.
“I don’t know how you could live with yourself. Only God will truly judge him.”
After the hearing, defense lawyer Louis DeFabio said he thinks Sharpe has taken responsibility for his role in the boy’s death even though he refuses to be labeled a murderer.
“He’s absolutely saying he did not murder him,” DeFabio said.
DeFabio said Sharpe and Snyder had an “out-of-control drug habit” at the time the boy died.
runyan@vindy.com