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Opening statements given in child-molestation trial
YOUNGSTOWN
An assistant county prosecutor maintains that a 34-year-old Campbell man sexually molested two girls early in 2009, when they were 4 and 5 years old.
However, the defense lawyer said his client, Milous Brown, of 13th Street, was set up by another man because of a paternity dispute concerning the older girl.
Brown is on trial before a nine-man, three-woman jury on two counts of gross sexual imposition, one pertaining to each girl.
Opening statements were Tuesday in the trial, over which Judge John M. Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court is presiding.
Natasha Frenchko, an assistant county prosecutor, described Brown as “a child molester.” She added: “The evidence will show that he is a sick and perverse individual, who sexually abused two little girls.”
The alleged victims told their older sister that Brown would touch them under their clothes, in their groins and on their buttocks and breasts in the bedroom the girls shared in their mother’s Campbell residence, the prosecutor said.
Brown engaged in this conduct when nobody else in the household was awake, Frenchko added.
“There’s more to the story, and certainly there’s more here than meets the eye,” Brown’s lawyer, Mark Lavelle, told the jury. “Something had happened to these girls, but it’s not because of him,” Lavelle said of Brown.
Because of the paternity dispute as to whether Brown or the other man was the father of the older girl, the other man took the allegations against Brown to the county Children Services Board, Lavelle said.
CSB investigated and took custody of the older girl, but she now lives with the other man, Lavelle said, adding that court-ordered paternity tests revealed the other man was her father.
Calling the charges against Brown “unsubstantiated, unproven and undocumented,” Lavelle told the jury there’s no scientific evidence any crime was committed.
The offenses reportedly occurred between Jan. 1 and March 7, 2009, according to the indictment against Brown.