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Former top athlete now getting another type of attention — from police
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Arbie D. Murray put up some impressive numbers when he was a senior basketball player at Howland High School in 2013.
He led his team in scoring at 16.5 points per game, three-point shooting percentage, free-throw-shooting percentage and was honored by his conference as one of the best players in the area.
These days, however, Murray is getting another kind of attention, not from admirers but from police officers, corrections officers and judges.
In 2015 alone, Murray, 20, with addresses in Howland and Niles, has been charged 29 times through Warren Municipal Court, six of them felonies, 13 misdemeanors and eight traffic charges. He had only one minor criminal offense before 2015.
He has four open felony cases in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, all of them charging him with drug trafficking. They are low-level felonies, meaning he may not get prison time if he’s convicted.
He may be on the verge of setting a record at the Courthouse, where he was indicted three separate times between June 17 and July 21, all of them on charges of trafficking in marijuana. A fourth case is pending with the grand jury. The arrests leading to the charges occurred March 23, April 9 and April 24.
Murray has been in police custody at least eight times this year, including March 6, March 18, March 23, April 18, April 28, July 8, July 12 and Aug. 2, according to the Trumbull County jail.
Murray once set Howland’s record for the most 3-point goals in a game by scoring nine in a 31-point performance against Boardman in February 2013.
He went on another type of streak in the spring of this year: He was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs Feb. 23, April 14 and April 27.
A Warren police officer said Murray was crying in a holding cell at Warren Municipal Court on April 28 and did things suggesting he might be suicidal.
In his most recent arrest, Aug. 2, Murray was pulled over at Youngstown Road and Kenilworth Avenue in the city for playing loud music.
The officer detected the smell of marijuana, saw green marijuana residue in the cup holder of the car and found a small scale in the car that was made to look like a cell phone. Police frequently consider such items to be drug paraphernalia.
Officers also found pills in the car for which Murray could not produce a prescription. Later at the Trumbull County jail, a packet containing a white powder believed to be drugs fell out of his sock.
He pleaded not guilty the next day to misdemeanor charges of drug possession and playing loud music and was released from the jail on a personal-recognizance bond, meaning he didn’t have to pay anything.
Ed Dyer, a longtime local substance-use disorder counselor, said someone with that many criminal charges occurring in such a short time may not have yet accrued enough convictions to give probation officers the leverage they need to confront his behavior.
But by the time some of those cases have resulted in convictions, the Trumbull County Adult Probation Department will be well aware of him, and it will most likely establish probationary guidelines, and possibly help.
“Adult probation will keep an eye on him,” Dyer said.