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Plea deal reached in 2001 tub drowning
The agreed-upon prison sentence totals 7 1‚Ñ2 years.
YOUNGS-TOWN — David Sharpe, the suspect in the 2001 bathtub drowning and dismemberment of 15-year-old James P. Higham, has pleaded guilty to reduced charges.
The prosecution and defense have agreed upon a 7 1‚Ñ2-year prison term for Sharpe, the maximum allowable sentence under the charges to which Sharpe pleaded guilty. Sharpe’s plea came just before his trial was set to begin Monday.
If Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court adopts that sentence, it will be nonappealable.
In the plea agreement, Robert E. Bush Jr., chief of the criminal division of the county prosecutor’s office, reduced the murder charge to reckless homicide, and he reduced a tampering-with-evidence charge to attempted tampering with evidence.
Bush dropped charges of child endangering and permitting child abuse, but he left intact a charge of gross abuse of a corpse.
Sharpe then pleaded guilty Friday to reckless homicide, for which the agreed-upon sentence is five years; attempted tampering with evidence, for which the agreed sentence is 18 months; and gross abuse of a corpse, for which the parties agreed to one year, with all prison terms to be served consecutively.
“To go to trial and not prevail would have been even more of an injustice to Jimmy ... I think the case was properly resolved,” Bush said of his decision to make the plea deal.
Bush said he believes a polygraph examiner’s finding that Sharpe showed deception when questioned about the homicide was instrumental in Sharpe’s decision to plead guilty.
Defense lawyer Lou DeFabio acknowledged the polygraph report, which would have been presented in a trial, was a factor in his client’s decision to plead guilty. But DeFabio said he disagrees with the examiner’s interpretation of the results.
“They would have had an extremely difficult time proving the murder as well as every other crime that was alleged,” DeFabio said of the prosecution had the case gone to trial.
“There’s no physical evidence to back up any of their allegations ... It essentially came down to the word of witnesses as to what allegedly happened,” he added.
DeFabio, however, said Sharpe faced substantial risk had he gone to trial. A murder conviction would have meant 15 years to life in prison.
Judge Sweeney revoked Sharpe’s $500,000 bond at Friday’s plea hearing, and he’ll remain jailed pending his 10 a.m. April 16 sentencing.
Police believe Sharpe, 46, of Pyatt Street, drowned the boy in a bathtub on or about June 15, 2001, after a domestic dispute at a Manchester Avenue residence.
The boy had been staying with Sharpe and his then live-in girlfriend, Jennifer L. Snyder, 35, who is a sister of the second wife of the boy’s father.
Snyder didn’t report the boy missing until Jan. 3, 2002.
The body was dismembered and disposed of in trash bins on the city’s South and West Sides, and the remains were taken to the Carbon Limestone landfill in Poland, prosecutors say.
Police believe the boy’s remains are buried 200 feet below the landfill’s surface and would be nearly impossible to locate.
Although the prosecution could have proceeded without the body, Bush said: “We cannot determine even the cause of death without a body, so it was a substantial hurdle. The lack of physical evidence is a substantial hurdle” for the prosecution if a homicide case goes to trial.
Judge Sweeney sent Snyder, who pleaded guilty to gross abuse of a corpse and child endangering, to prison for four years in December 2007. Snyder was to have been the prosecution’s main witness against Sharpe if the case had gone to trial.
On Friday, Judge Sweeney over-ruled Snyder’s request for early release from the Trumbull Correctional Institution.
Sharpe was indicted in November 2007 based on a videotaped statement Snyder gave to police.
milliken@vindy.com