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Teen’s estate files lawsuit in his death
The suit accuses Children Services of inadequate screening and intervention.
YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning County Children Services Board and its officials and two state-prison inmates have been sued for more than $10 million in the 2001 bathtub drowning and dismemberment of 15-year-old James P. Higham III.
The civil lawsuit, filed Friday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court by Higham’s estate, seeks more than $25,000 in compensatory damages and more than $10 million in punitive damages and demands a jury trial. The case is assigned to Judge Lou A. D’Apolito.
The complaint alleges CSB neglected its duty to ensure proper care for Higham, who was under board supervision, by neglecting to perform a thorough background check on Jennifer L. Snyder and her then live-in boyfriend, David Sharpe.
The suit also alleges the board failed to monitor domestic-violence reports and other complaints and failed to remove Higham from the couple’s Manchester Avenue home when circumstances dictated his removal.
The suit also said the board recklessly made false and misleading reports concerning Higham’s health and welfare and the fitness of Snyder and Sharpe to care for him. Snyder and Sharpe also are named as defendants in the civil lawsuit.
Snyder, 35, a sister of the second wife of the boy’s father, was sentenced by Judge Maureen A. Sweeney to four years in prison in December 2007 after she pleaded guilty to child endangering and gross abuse of a corpse.
Last month, Judge Sweeney sentenced Sharpe, 46, of Pyatt Street, to 71‚Ñ2 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, attempted tampering with evidence and gross abuse of a corpse.
Police believe the boy drowned in a bathtub on or about June 15, 2001, after a domestic dispute. Snyder didn’t report the boy missing until Jan. 3, 2002. Based on a statement Snyder later made to police, Sharpe was indicted in November 2007.
Higham’s body was dismembered and disposed of in trash bins on the city’s South and West sides, and his remains were taken to the Carbon-Limestone landfill in Poland, where they were never found, prosecutors said.
Gina Bricker, an assistant county prosecutor in the civil division, which defends county agencies against lawsuits, declined to comment on the civil matter on Tuesday, saying she hadn’t read the lawsuit.