City was in chaos, detectives recall

January 18, 2015 at 12:02a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

City police Detective Sgt. Jose Morales has investigated some of the grisliest murders in the city’s history and has been around some of its most hardened criminals.

One thing they almost all have in common, Morales said: When the going gets tough, they all ask for their mothers.

Morales was a detective in the 1990s, specifically 1995, when the city set a record for homicides in a single year with 68, part of a decade that saw a spike in the homicide rate that resulted in the killings of more than 500 people.

He and others who worked for the department at the time remember it as a constant grind that left little time for family, friends and sometimes even other work.

Morales said once suspects of murder are questioned and they realize they will probably be convicted and go to prison for the rest of their lives, their persona changes from that of the cold, hard criminal to a person who asks for their mother and sometimes breaks down in tears.

“It’s amazing how they change from that person with no consideration for human life once they realize their life is gone,” Morales said.

David McKnight, who retired as a captain and worked as a detective in the 1990s, described a macabre pattern to the madness: Shootings and homicides were fueled by other shootings or homicides, he said.

“This week’s [shooting] victim would be next week’s suspect,” McKnight said. “You started to know your suspects and your victims quite well.”

McKnight said familiarity, in his work world, did not breed contempt, because several victims were from the same families, and he came to know them over the years.

“It was easy to keep everything straight because you’re dealing with the same families for five or six years,” McKnight said.

Both Morales and Mc- Knight said an influx of crack cocaine into the city and the proliferation of gangs to sell it — who fought over turf — were the main reasons for the upsurge in homicides.

Detective Sgt. John Perdue, who is still in the department’s Detective Bureau and investigating homicide cases, said “the city was in chaos,” during that time.

“That year [1995] was the craziest,” Perdue said.

Perdue and Mc- Knight said their cases from that year did not stand out until they were shown a list of the year’s homicides. Morales said some do stand out for him, but they’re either ones that are unsolved or more for the suspects he arrested than for the victims.

It wasn’t just detectives who were feeling the grind. Patrol officers and members of the crime lab, or the part of the department that collects evidence at crime scenes, also were feeling the pressure.

Lou Ciavarella, who spent 37 years on the force, most of them in the crime lab, said between getting called out for homicides, shootings and other crimes, hardly any time was left for anything else other than work.

“You can’t think about nothing in your life other than your job because it’s pretty much all consuming,” Ciavarella said. “You’re taken away from your family and your friends. There’s no time for yourself.”

Ciavarella said during that time he once went to a seminar on how to collect evidence at homicides given by a police officer from a small town. Ciavarella asked the officer how much experience he had by asking him how many homicides his department had handled in the previous year. The answer was one. Ciavarella wasn’t impressed; he told the lecturer, “I had three last week.”

Robert Kuti, a former patrolman on the East Side for most of his more than 20 years in the department, said it was hard to get anyone to talk who may have witnessed a slaying or other violent crime.

“People would not come forward. They did not trust the police,” Kuti said. “They didn’t like the police. They had a take-care-of-it-yourself attitude.”

Morales said the collection of physical evidence was often the key to solving many murders, because of the difficulty of getting witnesses to talk. Morales said that once he would confront a suspect with a piece of evidence that tied him to the crime, he would begin talking.

“They know in their head once we get certain evidence they’re going to get charged, so they try to minimize their role,” Morales said.

Morales said the time was stressful for him because of the almost constant activity. A big concern was testifying in court because sometimes he was in two or three courtrooms in the same day testifying on different cases, and the department did not add personnel during that time.

McKnight said he was not just investigating murders in the city. Several times, a person with ties from Youngstown would end up murdered somewhere else, and he would often go to that city to confer with investigators. He said he and his late partner Detective Sgt. Gerald Maietta made several trips to Pittsburgh during that time to talk with detectives there.

Perdue said the big difference between now and the mid-1990s is the shooters themselves.

“They’re younger, and they show no remorse,” Perdue said.

“They won’t talk. They’ll take what happened with them to their graves.”