Parole board: No clemency for Davie

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

The Ohio Parole Board has unanimously recommended that no clemency be given to Roderick Davie, 38, the former Warren resident convicted of killing two workers at a Warren pet-

food warehouse and injuring a third in 1991.

The decision now rests with Gov. Ted Strickland as to whether Davie should be executed by lethal injection Aug. 10 at the Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville as scheduled.

But the parole board left no doubt about its belief that Davie deserves to die.

In its report, the parole board said Davie’s actions were “senseless and savage crimes involving multiple slayings of people who were going about their day earning a living.”

It added that the courts have found no irregularities involving Davie’s conviction, and “There is no injustice here to be corrected by clemency. There is no doubt as to his guilt or his mental culpability in these matters.”

Davie did not seek clemency for himself, unlike the two other Trumbull County killers who were executed by the state in the past year — Jason Getsy (August 2009) and Kenneth Biros (December 2009).

That fact, plus the brutality of Davie’s crimes, multiple victims and his record while he’s been in prison, makes Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins believe that Davie will be executed as scheduled, he said Thursday.

Strickland refused to grant clemency to Vernon Smith for the 1993 aggravated murder of Sohail Darwish, and the state executed Smith in January, Watkins said. Smith, like Davie, didn’t apply for clemency, and his crime involved fewer victims, Watkins said.

In Davie’s case, he walked into Veterinary Companies of America on Main Avenue Southwest, where he’d been recently fired, and ordered VCA employees John I. Coleman, Tracey Jefferys and William Everett to lie face-

down on the floor.

Everett, who survived, said Davie told them, “So you all work for VCA, huh?” Everett then heard gunshots and felt shots in the back of his head, shoulder and left arm. He remained conscious though he played dead.

Jefferys attempted to escape, but Davie brought her back at gunpoint. After firing his last bullet into Coleman, Davie beat Jefferys to death with several instruments, including a metal chair on which police later found Davie’s fingerprints in Jefferys’ blood.

The beating caused 36 separate lacerations on Jefferys, who was hit 50 times.

“She went through a very painful death. The room was a scene of blood lust,” Watkins said.

At Davie’s clemency hearing July 14, Jeffereys’ mother, Sandy Richmond, said Jefferys worked with Davie and sometimes gave him money for lunch and loaned her car to him.

Coleman was killed execution-style with five gunshots.

Everett told the parole board he occasionally socialized with Davie.

Davie has not been a good inmate, having been written up 50 times for bad behavior while in prison, Watkins said.

“This is an example of why you need the death penalty,” the prosecutor said, calling him an “unabashed psychopath.”