Victim to detail shooting for jury

staff report

YOUNGSTOWN — Robert Armstrong was trying to kill Eric Weaver when he shot him nine times in various parts of his body June 23 in Campbell, Robert E. Bush Jr., Mahoning County’s chief criminal prosecutor, told a jury.

“He shot him down at his door,” Bush said in his opening statement Monday in Armstrong’s trial on an attempted=murder charge with a firearm specification.

Bush said Weaver would testify during the trial and display his wounds for the jury.

“From June 23 until this date, approximately 51‚Ñ2 months, Eric Weaver has been either at St. Elizabeth hospital or a nursing home recovering from his wounds,” Bush told the jury.

Bush said the prosecution doesn’t know the motive for the shooting and isn’t required to prove the motive.

Armstrong’s lawyer, Michael Gollings, urged the jurors to keep an open mind, listen carefully to all the testimony from witnesses and instructions from the judge and not to reach any conclusions until the case is given to them for deliberations.

The trial of Armstrong, 26, of North Hazelwood Avenue, continues today before Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.

Weaver remained firm in his identification of Armstrong as the man who shot him, but prosecutors requested and received permission from the judge to drop charges of complicity to attempted murder against two other men due to insufficient evidence.

Charges against Jerbrail Grhim, 20, of Monroe Street, Campbell, and Elijah Johnson, 21, of Pasadena Avenue, in this matter were dismissed, but they could be refiled if sufficient evidence is found.

Judge Krichbaum will sentence Grhim at 10 a.m. Thursday in an unrelated case, in which Grhim pleaded guilty to felonious assault in the July 17 beating of a 16-month-old South Side boy.