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Inmates indicted in Trumbull jail hostage incident
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Two of the three men accused of taking a corrections officer hostage for five hours April 23 at the Trumbull County jail have been indicted on a variety of charges.
Both are in Ohio prisons for other offenses and were video arraigned Tuesday morning in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court. Both pleaded not guilty, and bonds of $100,000 were set for each.
Kevin T. Johns, 24, of Cincinnati, and Richard Ware, 27, of Warren were indicted on charges of kidnapping, aggravated robbery, possessing a deadly weapon while under detention, felonious assault and resistance to lawful authority.
If convicted, each could get about 40 years added to their prison term.
The third inmate, David Martin, 30, of Cleveland, was not charged in the hostage situation.
Mike Burnett, assistant Trumbull County prosecutor, said it would not be “in the interest of justice” to charge Martin “at this time” since Martin is already on death row for murder and also sentenced to 61 additional years in prison.
Burnett said the robbery charge stemmed from the hostage-takers taking the cellphone and portable radio from the corrections officer. The deadly-weapons charges relate to two of the inmates threatening the officer with knives they made from hard-plastic spoons and the third threatening to use a long handcuff key as a weapon.
The felonious-assault charge relates to the psychological injuries to the corrections officer as a result of the amount of time he was held against his will and threatened with his life, Burnett said.
There was little discussion between the inmates and court officials during the arraignment. Ware asked to have a different attorney during this case than the one that represented him in his earlier case.
Burnett called Martin “a driving force” in taking the officer hostage but said all three inmates “acted in concert” and had a specific role when they overpowered the officer.
Officials previously said the inmates held the officer in place during the ordeal by holding a plastic knife to his neck. The inmates were in an isolation pod together. They used sheets tied to the pod’s door handle to thwart attempts to rescue the officer.
“It was an in-depth plan. It’s obvious they had prepared ahead of time,” Burnett said of the inmates.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation handled the investigation into the hostage-taking and turned over its results to Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins several months ago.
Burnett said one reason the charges were not presented to a grand jury earlier was to avoid pretrial publicity of the charges being disseminated to the public while Martin’s murder trial was in progress during the fall.
Cleveland news reports said Martin used the corrections officer’s cellphone during the standoff to call a Cleveland television station to proclaim that he was innocent of allegations that he had threatened to use a gun to shoot a corrections officer the first chance he got.
The standoff ended peacefully after a hostage negotiator from the Warren Police Department talked to the inmates for several hours.
Ware was sentenced to 23 years in prison in September after pleading guilty to three counts of aggravated robbery and one of felonious assault for three robberies in December 2013.
Martin was sentenced in September to death for killing Jeremy Cole, 21, and attempting to kill Melissa Putnam, 30, in September 2012 in Warren.
Kevin T. Johns, 24, of Cincinnati, was sentenced to 28 years in prison April 15 for raping one woman and kidnapping another in 2013.
Sheriff Thomas Altiere said Tuesday one of the key things that changed after the ordeal was to replace cell door handles so they can’t be used against the staff in that way again.
He said the incident was also a “wake-up call” for the jail staff to make everyone more careful. “Everybody gets lax in their job once in a while. They are a lot more careful,” he said.