43
Youngstown cops track leads in murder on N. Side
and Jeanne Starmack
YOUNGSTOWN
Police have not made any arrests in the city’s most-recent homicide but have collected two cars believed to be associated with the killing and are talking to witnesses.
Pierre McKinney, 21, of Mercer Avenue was gunned down Wednesday afternoon as he sat in a car in the 100 block of Saranac Avenue. McKinney managed to get out of the car and run to the rear of a house, where he collapsed.
The shooters, who fired from another car, drove off on Saranac in a baby-blue Chevrolet Caprice with a vinyl top and chrome rims.
Capt. Mark Milstead said the investigation into the shooting is moving forward, and police do have suspects.
“We are in the process now of following up on a number of leads, and we have talked to a number of witnesses,” he said.
Those witnesses have led police to a suspect vehicle that was located and towed by police shortly after the shooting. Milstead said that car and the car in which McKinney was seated are being processed by police.
Milstead said police, at this time, do not believe the shooting was directly tied to any past murders in the city. He said it looks as if McKinney was involved in an ongoing fight with another individual.
“This may have been just a simple beef with another individual. We have information that he was in a fight with another individual earlier in the day,” said Milstead.
McKinney’s fianc e, Carrie Spires, said that is also her understanding.
“We have some idea,” she said Thursday. “We know what happened before he got killed.”
Spires said McKinney had been in a fist fight with one of the suspects less than an hour before the shooting.
Nonetheless, she said, a street fight should not have meant the end of her boyfriend’s life.
McKinney had two children, a boy, 6, and a girl, 4, she said.
“He made you glad when you were sad — he was a good man,” she said. They were to be married June 6, McKinney’s birthday.
The shooting was a brazen act that took place in the middle of the day as the North Side neighborhood residents were sitting outside and children were arriving home from school. There were multiple witnesses to the crime.
Spires said her son, Jabbar, was at the home of one of her friend’s. McKinney went there to pick him up.
After he pulled into the driveway, witnesses at the house said, the baby-blue-colored car pulled alongside the bottom of the drive. One of the two men inside it opened fire on McKinney, firing at least nine shots into the car. McKinney was struck multiple times, including once in the neck and in the torso.
After he was shot, he ran from the car to the backyard. Spires said her son called her to tell her what happened, and she ran from her home three blocks away to be with him.
She was there when he died. “He was trying to breathe,” she said. “I was telling him, ‘Hang on, hang on!’”
Spires said family and friends will try to raise money to bury McKinney. There will be donation cans in neighborhood stores.
She said there also will be a candlelight vigil to remember him. It’s set for 6 p.m. Saturday on Saranac where he was shot.
Reports say McKinney’s car had multiple bullet holes in it. Police also found two bullets on the car’s front seat.
McKinney had been shot in a drive-by shooting in the past. According to police reports, McKinney was leaving a South Avenue grocery store in June 2009 when he noticed a black SUV following him.
Reports say McKinney was attempting to enter the Himrod Avenue Expressway when someone inside the SUV began firing shots at the van McKinney was driving. McKinney was not injured in that shooting, but the rear window of the van was shot out.
McKinney had also been arrested once when he was 18 in 2008 for a weapons violation.
McKinney’s death is the city’s ninth homicide in 2012. The previous slaying was March 14. The city had recorded four homicides at this time in 2011.