State should deny parole to infamous Warren killer

How many breaks should a cold-blooded murderer get?

That’s a question that will confront the Ohio Parole Board this October when Pompie Junior Wade has a parole hearing.

Wade was the central figure in the senseless murder of one clerk and the attempted murder of another at a Warren beverage store a few days after Christmas in 1975. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death on March 17, 1976.

But he was saved from the electric chair by the Supreme Court of the United States, which declared Ohio’s death penalty law unconstitutional. That was a big break for Wade, but it wasn’t the first one. It was the second.

Those two breaks, along with the facts of the case, give the Parole Board every reason to reject Wade’s latest attempt to be released from the Ohio Penitentiary.

On Dec. 29, 1975, Dominic Chiarella, 51, and Frederick C. Piersol, 23, were at their part-time jobs at the Austin Beverage Store in the Austin Village Plaza on West Market Street in Warren. As trial testimony and exhibits would prove, Pompie Junior Wade and an accomplice, Moses Hurd, entered the store about 7 p.m., masked and armed. Chiarella was struck hard on the head with the butt of a gun and dragged into the cooler. At gunpoint, Piersol opened the cash register as he was told and was then marched into the cooler. Wade and Hurd took money from the cash register and items from the store’s shelves.

Hurd left. Wade began to leave, then turned, walked back into the cooler and emptied his revolver into Chiarella and Piersol.

It was a premeditated and gratuitous execution of Chiarella. Piersol, severely wounded, survived. As the robbers left, one of the things they grabbed was a bag of potato chips. That seems like a minor detail, but it is something worth remembering.

$2 worth of gasoline

Not long afterward, Wade and Hurd pulled into a service station, where their behavior made the attendant fear that he was going to be robbed. The two men paid for $2 worth of gasoline with coins and then loitered while customers came and went. After they finally left, the attendant heard on a police scanner the description of a car used in a robbery at Austin Village. He had noted the license number of the suspicious pair and called police.

Two Warren police officers spotted the car stopped on Duke Avenue Southeast. In the car were a shotgun, a 32-caliber revolver that turned out to be the murder weapon, a ski mask and Hurd and Wade, munching on potato chips taken from Austin Beverage.

They had left two men bleeding on the floor of a cooler – men who were doing what Wade and Hurd were wont to do, working rather than stealing for a living. And then they sat in a car eating their stolen chips.

It was a wanton crime, an affront to society and humanity. Then Trumbull County Prosecutor J. Walter Dragelevich and his assistant, Dennis Watkins, prosecuted Wade on charges of aggravated murder with specifications, attempted aggravated murder and aggravated robbery. Hurd was convicted of lesser charges.

A jury found Wade guilty on all counts, and he was sentenced to death.

As we mentioned, Wade avoided execution when Ohio’s death penalty was declared unconstitutional in 1978. He was sentenced to life in prison.

And as we mentioned, that wasn’t the only break Wade had gotten. Wade killed a man in a bar in Warren a few years before the Austin Village robbery. He was charged with murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter and sent to the penitentiary. After being released, he was still on parole when he killed Dominic Chiarella and wounded Frederick Piersol.

Watkins is now the Trumbull County prosecutor, and he will be assembling his office’s response to Wade’s possible parole. Expect it to be strong. State Rep. Michael O’Brien is soliciting letters from community leaders in opposition to Wade’s release. Some, like himself, still remember the senselessness of Wade’s act and have seen the pain suffered by the families of Wade’s victims.

Forty years is a long time to spend in prison. But it is not life. Wade, 63, has killed twice in the past without a demonstration of remorse, and should not be given a third opportunity to show his contempt for law and life.