Mentor’s motives questioned

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

By one account, Richard Beasley was a devoted mentor to a 16-year-old high school junior, taking him to church almost weekly, going fishing, playing video games and involving him in volunteer work.

The teenager’s mother paints another picture of Beasley, 52 — that of a man who threatened her son and who once said that he knew where the teen lived and that “I know where your mother lives.”

Whatever the nature of the relationship, it apparently ended this month after the teen was charged with attempted murder in a scheme that police say lured applicants for a phony Craigslist job posting into deadly robberies.

Police believe two deaths are connected to the scam but haven’t said whether another body found Friday is linked. A fourth man who said he answered the same ad survived a shooting, while a fifth man says he interviewed with Beasley for the fake job as a farmhand but decided not to take it.

Beasley, a self-described minister, has been jailed on unrelated prostitution charges.

Beasley’s mother has said that her son had taken the boy to The Chapel, an Akron megachurch, since he was 7 or 8 years old, according to WEWS-TV of Cleveland, and that they did volunteer work together.

The boy, a junior at Stow Munroe City Schools about 40 miles southeast of Cleveland, was questioned by the FBI at school Nov. 16, then arrested at home later that day, school spokeswoman Jacquie Mazziotta said Monday.

He has been warned he will face trial as an adult and could face more than 40 years in prison, his mother told The Associated Press in a phone interview from her home in the Akron area. A judge planned a hearing in Noble County to day.

“My son is not a monster,” his mother said. She stopped short of saying he provided the tip that led to the discovery of the Akron-area body but said he “has told everything he knows.”

“He’s a scared little boy,” she said.

The farm advertised on Craigslist does not exist; the remote Noble County area where two bodies were found 90 miles south of Akron is property owned by a coal company and often leased to hunters.

The men who interviewed for the Craigslist ad came from around the country but shared much in common. They were middle-aged or just beyond, between 47 and 58 years old.

They were unattached, either single or divorced. They needed work badly enough that they were willing to travel hundreds of miles on the barest of details about the job. Above all, they seemed the type of men whose disappearances might go unnoticed for a while.

Ron Sanson, of Stow, said he responded to the ad and met Beasley at a shopping mall food court outside Akron on Oct. 10. Beasley told him he was looking for an older, single or divorced person to watch over a 688-acre farm in southeast Ohio — the kind of man, Sanson says, whose disappearance might not be quickly noticed.

“How many other people have filled out an application, met with the guy and, you know, and no one knows they’re gone right now?” Sanson has said.

The teenager’s mother said she has been inundated with calls from those who know their son, saying he wasn’t capable of violence. She urged prayers for victims’ families and for her son’s exoneration.

“Pray for the families and pray that America and everybody else finds the real monster that robbed these families of their men,” she said.

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Welsh-Huggins reported from Columbus. Associated Press writers Kantele Franko and Andy Brownfield contributed to this report.

Welsh-Huggins can be reached at http://twitter.com/awhcolumbus.