Foster mom arraigned in girl’s death

By Ed Runyan

The driver in a Howland homicide has pleaded guilty to complicity to involuntary manslaughter.

WARREN — A Champion woman who was serving as foster mother for 20-month-old Tiffany Sue Banks when the girl was found unconscious last April has pleaded innocent to murder and felonious assault.

Bonnie Pattinson, 31, of 663 Center St. West in Champion Township and 70 Broad Street in Newton Falls, was arrested Friday after a Trumbull County grand jury handed up a secret indictment.

She was brought to the Trumbull County Courthouse, where she was arraigned on the charges late Friday. She is in Trumbull County jail in lieu of $1 million bond.

The indictment says Pattinson killed the girl as a result of committing felonious assault.

If convicted of murder, she could get 15 years to life in prison. The felonious assault carries a penalty of up to eight years in prison.

Champion police said Pattinson told them the girl had taken a nap for about 10 to 20 minutes, and when Pattinson checked on her, Tiffany was not breathing.

Pattinson took the girl to the other side of the duplex where she lived, and a neighbor called 911.

When a Champion police officer arrived, he and the duplex neighbor tried CPR, rescue breathing and used a mobile defibrillator from the cruiser to try to revive the girl, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

In late July, Dr. Humphrney Germaniuk, Trumbull County coroner, ruled Tiffany’s death was a homicide and said the cause was asphyxia (lack of oxygen) associated with multiple blunt-force injuries.

A nurse at the hospital and an EMS worker both said the girl had marks on her body that had not come from the medical attention she had received, Champion police said.

Pattinson and her husband, William, were serving as foster parents for Tiffany, who had been taken from her birth mother, Felicia Banks of Warren, at the hospital within one day of her birth.

Banks’ family said Trumbull County Children Services took custody of Banks’ first child a couple years before Tiffany was born. Felicia Banks has a third child who lives with the child’s father’s family.

Dr. Germaniuk said it took several months to rule on the girl’s cause of death because of the battery of tests that were done on her body.

Also late Friday, Michael Ahladis, 24, of Jefferson Street Southwest in Warren, pleaded guilty to complicity to involuntary manslaughter, complicity to aggravated burglary and tampering with evidence — charges that carry a penalty of up to 31 years in prison — for his role in the robbery and killing of Cameron Murray, 21, Dec. 23 in Howland.

He will be sentenced in about six weeks.

An affidavit in the case said Ahladis drove Delshawn Scrivens, 25, of Wood Street Southwest, and Oryan L. Miller, 19, of Hall Street Northwest, both of Warren, to Murray’s apartment on Sandpiper Trail off East Market Street just west of Howland High School for a robbery.

A while later, Ahladis received a call from the men saying they had been shot and to pick them up. Murray was later found dead of gunshot wounds in the doorway of his apartment.

Ahladis returned to the apartment and picked up Scrivens, who later died in the hospital, and Miller. Both were taken to different hospitals with gunshot wounds. In court Friday, Chuck Morrow, assistant county prosecutor, said Ahladis tried to clean up the blood from inside his father’s pickup truck afterward.

Before his plea, Ahladis faced a charge of complicity to murder, which carries a penalty of 15 years to life in prison, plus two other charges.

Miller has pleaded innocent to complicity to murder and several other charges and is in Trumbull County jail awaiting trial.

runyan@vindy.com