Execution set Thursday for killer of 2 men

A three-judge panel in Youngstown will hear a last-minute appeal at 2 p.m. today.

Staff and wire report

Photo

Mark Aaron Brown

COLUMBUS — A man who bragged that he would do a “Menace II Society,” referring to the movie that begins with the killing of two store clerks, faces execution Thursday in the Jan. 28, 1994, slayings of a convenience-store owner and a clerk on Youngstown’s North Side.

After being convicted by a jury, Mark Aaron Brown, 37, was sentenced to death for killing Isam Salman, 32, owner of Midway Market on Elm Street, and to life in prison for killing the clerk, Hayder Al-Turk, 30, who was shot first. Both victims were fatally shot in the head at the store.

The Ohio Supreme Court refused late Monday to delay the execution of Brown, which is to take place at Lucasville. Brown, 37, is a death- row inmate at the Ohio State Penitentiary on Youngstown’s East Side.

In another last-minute development, the 7th District Court of Appeals announced late Monday that oral arguments on whether Brown will get a new trial will be at 2 p.m. today before a three-judge panel.

Hearing the case at the appeals court at 131 W. Federal St., Youngstown, will be Judges Gene Donofrio, Cheryl L. Waite and Mary DeGenaro.

The appellate judges will be hearing Brown’s appeal of the decision by Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court not to grant him a new trial.

The Ohio Public Defender’s Office asked for a new trial based on what it said was newly discovered evidence, but, after a hearing last month, Judge Sweeney found two witnesses who recanted their trial testimony not to be credible.

Prosecutors said the death sentence for Salman’s slaying reflected the circumstances — the second victim was cowering under a counter and was shot at close range. There was disputed testimony on whether Brown had a confrontation before shooting the first victim.

“Police were able to get from Mark Brown’s friends that Mark told them before he went to that market that night that he was going to commit a ‘Menace II Society,’” said Brad Gessner, who prosecuted the case. He now works as an assistant Summit County prosecutor in Akron.

Gessner and a fellow prosecutor, unfamiliar with the movie, needed to watch just the first few minutes of the film to get the gist of Brown’s bragging.

“Mark Brown had a plan in his head that he wanted to go kill two people in a store, two store clerks, and went through and did it and did it in a manner that there was no sense to it at all,” Gessner said in an interview.

Prosecutors asked to show the movie, or at least the opening, for the trial jury, but the judge refused. Still, jurors learned about the “Menace II Society” connection from police testimony.

“One witness stated that they had been watching that movie, and they believe that’s what had caused it,” said Youngstown police Lt. David McKnight, who was a detective sergeant when he investigated the slayings.

McKnight believes the killings resulted from an inner rage that emerged from Brown, who was out with a friend drinking Valium-laced wine and smoking cigars that had been gouged out and refilled with marijuana.

“They were obviously very high. Sometimes when they get high, people are quick to anger,” Mc- Knight said.

Brown said he shot Al-Turk but didn’t remember shooting Salman. He appealed for clemency, but the state parole board voted unanimously in January that there didn’t appear to be any “manifest injustice in either the conviction or the sentence.”

Brown asked the parole board by video-conference hookup to recommend that his life be spared. He said he had become a changed, mature man and was trying to positively influence his four teenage children, his nephew and his nephew’s friends by urging them to stay in school and avoid the mistakes he had made.

His public defender, Rachel Troutman, told the parole board that Brown’s mother was a lifelong drug abuser who abused and neglected her children and eventually abandoned Brown. Without any adult support after he was robbed by a gang, Brown joined a rival gang, the defense said.

Troutman said Monday the “Menace II Society” claim came from a witness who wasn’t credible because he allowed his nephew to go into the store with Brown, in effect putting a family member at risk if he believed Brown was determined to pull off a double murder.

The killings occurred in a blue-collar neighborhood where the Salman family of immigrant Arabs had started what became a group of several inner-city stores. The location closed after the killings and left the neighborhood without a store and deteriorating, McKnight said.

“I don’t think the neighborhood ever really recovered after that,” he said.