Man gets 16 years in prison for robbery

Staff report

WARREN

A 21-year-old city man was sentenced to 16 years in prison Monday for a robbery on Tod Avenue Northwest a year ago — during which he and an accomplice knocked out an elderly woman’s teeth and injured her neck.

Ralph Underwood of Maryland Street Northwest received 10 years in prison for the aggravated burglary, aggravated robbery, kidnapping and felonious assault and an additional six years for being a repeat violent offender.

Judge Peter Kontos of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court gave Underwood the extra six years because Underwood previously was convicted of aggravated robbery and burglary in Hamilton County.

Underwood was sentenced to three years in prison on those charges when he was 15 years old in January 2006.

The victim was not in court for Underwood’s sentencing, but she wrote a statement, and Miriam Fife, Trumbull County victim- witness advocate, read it to the court. In the statement, the woman said her attackers broke into her home Jan. 10, 2010, and held her head down, which caused her face to be pushed into the bed, breaking four front teeth.

“Then they had to be dug out by a dental surgeon, thereby having to suffer the embarrassment of having no front teeth for almost two months,” she said.

“In this struggle, my neck was injured. I had just had another disc removed to remove the neural pain when he brought it back again,” she wrote.

Police said the thieves broke into the house while the woman was asleep, then put a blanket over her head. The injuries occurred as one of the men held her head down under the blanket.

Underwood apologized to the victim and his own family before sentencing.

Underwood’s co-defendant, DeVincent C. Lowery, 19, of Peerless Avenue Southwest, was sentenced in May to nine years in prison for his role in the crime.

Police arrested Underwood and Lowery in the parking lot of the Mahoning Avenue Giant Eagle supermarket shortly after the robbery with help from neighbors of the victim, who reported the robbery and told police where the men had gone afterward.

Police recovered two boxes of jewelry that had been stolen from the house in the back of a pickup truck that had been parked in the store parking lot.