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9-year case ends with plea; defendant wants to move on
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Duniek Christian told a Mahoning County Common Pleas Court judge Tuesday it was time.
Time to end a case against him that stretched back to July 1, 2005.
Christian, 30, pleaded guilty before Judge Shirley J. Christian to seven counts of complicity to commit felonious assault for a rolling gunbattle with police on the East Side that July, heading off a trial that was to begin Monday.
Prosecutors and defense attorney David Engler agreed on a sentence of eight years plus an additional three years for a firearm specification that a firearm was used. The maximum sentence he could have received was 73 years in prison. He was given credit for 2,555 days served.
Christian said he wants to serve his sentence and start living his life. He said he wants to care for his mother, who has stage 4 cancer, and that several other relatives have died since he has been in jail.
“I just want to get out of jail and raise my daughter,” Christian said. “I want to be the best father I can be. A lot of people have passed since I’ve been in here. I just want to get it over with. I don’t want this hanging over my head.”
Christian said he received his GED while he was in jail and also is taking classes through Ashland University for his college degree.
Police said Christian was one of four people in a car that was taken at gunpoint from a secretary at a Wilson Avenue church July 1, 2005. When the car was spotted by police, the men inside fired automatic weapons at officers, who exchanged fire with them.
No one was hit. The car stopped at a field on the East Side and triggered a six-hour manhunt that included a helicopter, but the men were not found until the next day.
Christian was tried in 2008 before former Judge James C. Evans and a jury acquitted him of felonious charges but was “undecided” on whether he was guilty of complicity.
In 2009, the 7th District Court of Appeals ruled that Christian could be tried by prosecutors on the charge of complicity to commit felonious assault and the case was brought back to Judge Evans’ docket, after the judge decided after Christian’s original trial that he would not be retried.
He was arrested in November 2010 on warrants for the charges and led police on a chase that ended after he crashed a car into a fence and fled.
He was convicted in common pleas court in that case. He was sentenced to three years in prison for that case.