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Caulton convicted in death at game
The man is facing life in prison.
YOUNGSTOWN — The trial lasted a full week, but jurors took only about three hours to find Anthony Caulton guilty of murder.
The 27-year-old East Auburndale Avenue man has been on trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court for a week on accusations of fatally shooting Larry D. Jones, 31, of Ravenwood Avenue, at the former South High Stadium football field during a youth football game in 2006.
Caulton was found guilty of murder and a gun specification.
Visiting Judge Thomas Curran is wasting no time in pronouncing a sentence on Caulton in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. His sentencing will be at 2 p.m. today. He is facing life imprisonment.
Dawn Cantalamessa and Mark Hockensmith, assistant county prosecutors handling the trial, and Atty. Lynn Maro, representing Caulton, offered closing statements Monday afternoon before the case was handed over to the jury for deliberations at 3:30 p.m. A jury of four women and eight men spent the rest of the afternoon deliberating the case, returning with a verdict about 6:30 p.m.
Hockensmith, in his closing statement, told the jury that Jones went to the field simply expecting to see a family member play football. He reminded jurors of the safe environment most people expect to see at a little league sporting event.
“A Pee-Wee Football game is supposed to be a family-friendly safe environment,” he said. “What you don’t expect, and what Larry Jones did not anticipate, was a shooting.”
Hockensmith reminded the jurors of the emotional testimony from Jones’s mother and sister. He also asked the jurors to take into account the chaos and high emotions of the day in question when considering testimony from those who did not directly identify Caulton as the shooter.
Hockensmith focused on the testimony of Christopher Thomas, a man who attended the game and stood mere feet from the site of the shooting. Thomas identified Caulton as the shooter in open court, and prosecutors used as evidence a diagram Thomas drew moments after the shooting detailing the events that took place on the field before, during and after the shooting.
Maro, in her closing statement, asked the jury to set aside the emotional image of a shooting on the field and the emotional testimony of the victim’s family, looking only at the facts presented in the case. She said witnesses offered by the state did nothing to establish murder by Caulton.
“When you look at the evidence in this case, when you objectively analyze it, the state of Ohio has not met its burden of proof,” said Maro.
She told the jury that police rushed to judgement after hearing whispers of Caulton’s name shortly after the shooting. She said police had at least one additional name, but did not investigate that lead because of a focus on Caulton.
“In their haste to solve this crime, they did not follow procedures here,” she said. “There was not just one suspect, [but] there was only one person they bothered to look into.”
Maro said even Thomas, a key witness for the prosecution, had been influenced by accounts in the media and rumors around town before offering statements to police days after the shooting.
jgoodwin@vindy.com