Champion man found guilty of raping 13-year-old female relative in his home

An additional DNA test was used in the second trial.

STAFF report

WARREN — A jury deliberated 37 minutes before returning a guilty verdict — saying that Martin E. Warren, 61, of Champion, is guilty of raping a 13-year-old female relative in his Cleveland Avenue home nearly four years ago.

Warren was handcuffed and taken to the Trumbull County Jail to await sentencing Jan. 4. The trial, the second one for Warren in a year, was heard by Judge Peter Kontos of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court. Warren could get up to 10 years in prison.

Another jury deliberated for nearly two days last January before finding Warren innocent of one rape count involving the girl and saying it could not decide on the other count.

The Trumbull County prosecutor’s office decided to retry Warren after submitting the remaining fluid evidence to a private laboratory.

A. Dwayne Winston of the North Carolina company LabCorp testified this week about that work. Winston said that the Y chromosome STR test LabCorp conducted this year on the DNA samples taken from the girl’s body showed that there was a one in 19 chance that the DNA had come from Martin E. Warren or a male relative of his.

In the first trial, scientists with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal identification and Investigation said they were unable to determine whether the DNA contained in the fluid came from Warren.

But they indicated that the chances that DNA in the girl’s underwear came from anyone but Warren were 1 in 4 quintrillion people, more people than exist on the earth.

The girl has testified to a Saturday in January 2006 when she went to the basement to help Warren with a computer game, teased him in a way that was common to them and then found him kissing her and removing part of her clothes and his clothes.

After a couple of minutes in which the girl says Warren committed offenses against her, the girl ran to a gas station to call her grandmother for help, she said.