7-year prison term in home-invasion case

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

A 26-year-old Ford Avenue man is going to prison for seven years for an armed home invasion March 1 on the city’s South Side that had three victims.

Steve Gardner drew the sentence Thursday from Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court after he pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery with a gun specification and being a felon with a gun.

The sentence is nonappealable because it was agreed upon by the prosecution and defense and adopted by the judge.

The prosecution dropped charges of aggravated burglary and improperly discharging a gun into a house and repeat violent-offender specifications.

The charge of being a felon with a gun stemmed from Gardner’s June 2006 involuntary manslaughter conviction in the March 22, 2003, shooting death of Larry Robbins, 39, of Norwood Avenue, a former Youngstown Pride professional basketball player. Gardner drew a three-year prison term for that crime.

In the March 1 incident, Gardner broke a screen-door window, kicked in the front door, and entered a house in the 800 block of Cameron Avenue.

Gardner, who was looking for a man who escaped from the house as he arrived, ripped a phone cord from the wall, and pointed a long-barreled revolver at everyone in the house, police reports said.

Gardner then chased another man who ran from the house into the front yard, robbing him of $20 at gunpoint, fired five shots into the house, and left in the car in which he arrived. There were no injuries.