Investigators questioned fired Trumbull officer’s ties to hostage-taking inmate

TRUMBULL COUNTY

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

An investigation of the April 2014 Trumbull County Jail hostage incident focused on a dangerous inmate’s communications with then-corrections officer James D. Millik.

That inmate and two others ambushed another guard, Joe Lynn, who, while on a routine “watch tour” patrol, was taken hostage for five hours.

He was freed uninjured after the three inmates surrendered.

Millik, a 15-year veteran, was fired after the investigation. He earned unemployment for wrongful dismissal – which the county is now appealing. Maj. Tom Stewart, the sheriff office’s internal-affairs investigator, examined the incident and interviewed Millik and Lynn. The records of that investigation were recently obtained by The Vindicator through a public- records request.

In the minutes before Lynn was overtaken, inmates David Martin, Richard Ware and Kevin Johns each contacted Millik over the jail’s intercom system, which is recorded.

Millik began his shift at 3 p.m. Lynn was taken hostage by those three at 3:15 p.m.

Stewart wanted to know whether Millik had told one or more of the inmates that Lynn was the officer who would be handling the watch tours that day – information that could have had deadly consequences for Lynn.

The jail has a policy of randomly assigning different corrections officers to the watch tours and keeping those assignments secret from the inmates to prevent trouble. Telling an inmate what corrections officer is making watch tours violates jail policy.

Martin could have had a reason to target Lynn, some believed.

During Martin’s capital murder trial in September 2013, he was outfitted with a special stun vest. The vest had a remote control that a deputy could activate and send electric current into his body if Martin showed any signs of misbehaving.

That move was prompted by a report that Martin threatened to grab a gun during proceedings and use it at the county courthouse. Lynn was the jail official who offered that tip.

During the hostage standoff, Martin mentioned his purported threat while talking on Lynn’s cellphone to a Cleveland television station. He told the TV station that Lynn was “willing to take a polygraph test to tell the news media and to prove to the courts outside of my case that I never made that threat. It’s bad enough I’m facing the death penalty,” according to TV station WOIO of Cleveland. Martin is a Cleveland native.

Martin was sentenced to death at the end of the trial. Deputies did not have to activate the stun vest.

Stewart also questioned Millik about his relationship with Martin because of a favor Millik did for Martin that got Millik into trouble.

A few days before the hostage ordeal, Millik gave a note from Martin to a female inmate, a violation of jail rules, Stewart said. Martin had asked Millik to give the note to another corrections officer to give to the female inmate, but Millik did it himself about three days later.

Millik and three other corrections officers were disciplined for delivering inmate notes in April 2013.

About the three inmate conversations preceding Lynn’s tour, Millik denied he had told Martin that Lynn was the corrections officer handling watch tours that day. Millik said he thought he was communicating with the inmates about recreation time, but he said he could not remember exactly.

A polygraph examiner later said Millik was untruthful when he denied that he had told Martin about Lynn.

But an examiner for the Ohio Unemployment Compensation Review Commission ruled the polygraph exam was flawed, so Millik’s termination was “without just cause.”

Millik was thus approved to receive unemployment compensation. The sheriff’s office appealed that decision in March in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, and it is pending.

Lynn told investigators he was unhappy with Millik’s slow response to the situation.

“When I was grabbed, I keyed my radio and I tried to yell ‘Code 10,’ which is the ‘officer in distress’ code. I was being strangled, and the only thing that came out of the radio was a garble,” Lynn told an investigator last fall.

“And they heard the garble over the radio, three other floors, but there was still no call for assistance for almost a minute, a minute and a half,” Lynn said.

“They [dragged] me into the cell and had me on the ground and ... started tying me up before [corrections officer] Millik made the notification that I was gone. That was a long time,” Lynn said.

Lynn said the main job Millik had that day, as the officer in the fourth-floor control room, “is to have eyes on the officer doing the watch tours. We’re in there alone.”

Lynn was not injured, and two of the inmates were later indicted for their role in the hostage situation.

When interviewed by Stewart, Millik said he heard gurgling coming from Lynn’s portable radio while Millik was looking at the control-room computer, but it was difficult to see Lynn because of the jail’s layout.

He then stood up and walked up some steps, and that’s when he could see Martin with Lynn’s portable radio and could tell something was wrong, he said.

Stewart interviewed Millik in May 2014, asking him about everything he did from the time he started work that day about 3 p.m. until the hostage situation began about 3:15 p.m.