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Deputy pleads guilty to 2 felonies
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By ED RUNYAN
WARREN
A Mahoning County deputy sheriff who served as a corrections officer and part-time Braceville Township police officer has pleaded guilty to two felonies and won’t be able to serve as a police officer again.
Ryan M. Freeman, 31, of Front Street Southwest, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court to two counts of unauthorized use of a computer system, fifth-degree felonies, and will be sentenced later.
A jury was selected Monday in his trial, and testimony was about to begin Tuesday morning, when Freeman chose instead to plead guilty to reduced charges.
He was indicted on two additional counts of obstructing justice and two additional counts of disclosure of confidential information and faced more than 12 years in prison.
After the Trumbull County Adult Probation Department conducts a presentence investigation, Freeman could get up to two years in prison.
The Mahoning County sheriff’s office placed Freeman on paid administrative leave in January after officers with the Trumbull Ashtabula Group Law Enforcement Task Force charged him with improperly using the law-enforcement-only Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway database.
TAG said Freeman looked up information about Fred D. Johnson, 39, of 714 Homewood Ave. S.E. in Warren and two Trumbull County law-enforcement officers while Johnson was in Freeman’s home in December.
Johnson and Brandi L. Purbaugh, 26, who lived with Johnson and also was in Freeman’s house, were later charged with aggravated drug trafficking, and their cases are pending in common-pleas court.
“There was no way we were going to allow him to plead guilty to misdemeanors,” Chris Becker, an assistant Trumbull County prosecutor, said Tuesday after the plea hearing, because the felony convictions will make it impossible for him to work in law enforcement again.
Becker said it was determined that Freeman looked up information about Johnson on the OLEG database that indicated that a TAG officer had recently looked up information about Johnson and started to build a case against him.
Freeman also looked up personal information about two TAG officers, including a photograph of them and their home addresses.
Becker noted that the information Freeman provided to Johnson “puts the [TAG] officer at a disadvantage” in that his investigation and the identity of the investigator are no longer secret.