Shooting victim gives testimony

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Store owner Mohammad Darwish didn’t look up as a customer stood across the counter asking for a Black and Mild cigar.

As Darwish turned back to the customer with the cigar, he heard “bam” as a gunshot hit his left hand and then his stomach.

“He asked me for the money. ‘Give me the money, mother ...,’” Darwish started to say, not finishing the word as he related the story Tuesday to jurors in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.

Though Darwish was bleeding, he obeyed his attacker’s demands and took money from two cash registers and gave it to the man.

“He ordered me for more money,” Darwish said, so he took cash from another location near the register and handed it to the man.

This time, he noticed that his attacker, a black man wearing a baseball cap and hooded sweat shirt, had a tattoo on the right side of his neck.

Soon, the attacker was on his way out the door, but Darwish looked up at a security monitor and saw that his wife had returned in her car and was about 100 feet from the exit door.

“I said, ‘He will waste my wife and we’ll both be dead,’” Darwish said. He said that he moved to the front door where he could see his wife, and yelled out: “Don’t come in the store.” Darwish went back inside and lost consciousness.

Trails of blood were throughout the store in the areas where Darwish had walked. The counter behind the cash register was covered in Darwish’s blood. Photos projected onto a screen for the jury also showed a bottle of a beverage called Guzzler and a bag of Doritos on the counter.

Darwish’s wife saw the fleeing man, called 911 and followed him to the street behind the North End Market on North Park Avenue, where the man disappeared.

Darwish was the first person to testify in the trial of Jacquavis K. Williams, 22, of Palmyra Road Southwest. Williams is charged with aggravated robbery and felonious assault in the attack on Darwish, who spent two weeks in the hospital after the attack.

The 59-year-old store owner was not able to identify his attacker in a photo lineup after Williams was arrested in August. He gave police the gunman’s approximate height and described the man’s clothing and skin color.

The video surveillance system in the store wasn’t working, and no other witness was able to identify the gunman.

But police and prosecutors did get one piece of information they hope will convince jurors that Williams committed the crime: DNA lifted from the Guzzler bottle.

Workers at the state crime lab in Richfield determined that the DNA from the bottle matched two people — Darwish, Williams and an unidentified third person, said Chris Becker, an assistant Trumbull County prosecutor.

Darwish’s DNA was on the bottle because he and one employee stock the bottles into their coolers, Becker said. The unidentified person could be an employee at the factory where the beverage is bottled, Becker speculated.

But Becker told jurors in his opening statement that Williams’ DNA on the bottle indicates he was the gunman.

In a taped police interview of Williams from August, he admitted being in the store just prior to the robbery, Becker said.

He also said he bought the same items that were found on the counter — Guzzler, Doritos and a Black and Mild, Becker said.

“He bought the three items. That’s a heck of a coincidence,” Becker said, adding later, “It’s also a heck of a coincidence that his DNA is on them.”

Matthew Pentz, Williams’ attorney, told jurors he would show that his client is innocent by pointing out discrepancies in witnesses’ description of the gunman. He also will show that some of the items Williams said he bought are not the same ones police later recovered from the counter.

“You’re going to ask yourself the reasonableness of what the state has to offer,” Pentz said.