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Habitual criminal faces more charges
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
A 47-year-old city man who has been charged with criminal offenses 60 times in the past nine years and spent several years before that in a psychiatric hospital, is perhaps the Warren Police Department’s best-known habitual criminal offender.
Warren Municipal Court Magistrate Dan Gerin this week ordered that Andre M. Ervin of Pine Avenue Southeast be held in the Trumbull County jail without eligibility to make bond after Warren police charged him with groping a 16-year-old Harding High School student on her way to school early this month.
The girl said Ervin approached her as she was walking on Summit Street at 7:05 a.m. Oct. 7 and groped her. The girl ran away and reported the incident to a school resource officer.
Ervin, whose 60 court cases mostly involved misdemeanors, faces the possibility of having his case heard by a judge in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court as a result of his most recent charge, a felony.
The last time Ervin went before a common-pleas court judge, in 1996, Judge Andrew Logan ordered that Ervin be placed in a psychiatric hospital in Columbus. Ervin remained institutionalized for about five years — the maximum amount of time Ohio law allowed.
In the years afterward, Ervin was charged in Warren Municipal Court with trespassing, gross sexual imposition, disorderly conduct, driving under suspension, menacing, theft, breaking and entering, burglary, disorderly conduct, possessing drug paraphernalia, assault and vehicle trespass.
Capt. Joe Marhulik of the Warren Police Department says there have been days when officers had to respond to calls regarding Ervin four and five times.
Marhulik said most calls regarding Ervin are “nuisance calls.” But Ervin is probably “at the top of the list” of the people Warren police officers arrest on a regular basis, Marhulik said.
Marhulik said several Warren police officers have received crisis-intervention training so that they better understand how to help people with mental-health issues.
Judge Logan isn’t the only judge who has ever sought an evaluation for Ervin.
As a result of a November 2010 misdemeanor disorderly-conduct charge filed by Warren police, Judge Terry Ivanchak of Warren Municipal Court ordered an evaluation to determine whether Ervin was competent to stand trial.
The Forensic Center of Northeast Ohio in Austintown told Judge Ivanchak in January 2011 that Ervin needed to be placed in Heartland Behavioral Health Care Center in Massillon for treatment.
About two weeks later, at the request of Heartland and in consultation with Valley Counseling Services of Warren, Ervin was placed in a Warren “step-down” facility, according to Warren Municipal Court records.
Ervin returns to Warren Municipal Court on Wednesday before Judge Thomas Gysegem.