Miriam Fife retiring from job that evolved from personal tragedy 30 years ago

WARREN

It’s been nearly 30 years since Raymond Fife, 12, was brutalized by Danny Lee Hill, 18, and Timothy Combs, 17, on a walking path along Palmyra Road Southwest as he rode his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting.

But the horror of the 1985 attack and Fife’s death a few days later shocked and changed the community.

Judge W. Wyatt McKay of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, one of two attorneys who prosecuted the case, said the public was justified in being stunned by the details that emerged, but some of the information was too awful to release.

“Even today, I don’t think the community knows many of the facts of the case,” he said this week.

As the story unfolded and the killers were put on trial and sentenced, the public caught glimpses of the boy’s mother, Miriam Fife, who came to symbolize the pain endured by survivors of senseless violence, especially cases involving children.

Miriam Fife, however, was not just devastated by the loss of her boy. She was angry that she never knew Hill was free to roam in her west side neighborhood despite having committed two rapes when he was a juvenile — a year or so before he and Combs raped and killed her son.

At the time, Ohio law governing crimes committed by juveniles protected the offender from being identified.

“I had no information other than what these two monsters had done” to Raymond, she said. If she had known, her attitude toward her son’s traveling alone would have been different, she said.

Hill was sentenced to death, but appeals have prevented his execution. Combs was sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for a parole hearing in 2049. When the second of the two murder trials ended in 1986, Fife chose to get involved.

“I wanted to change some things,” she said.

At first, she was a volunteer victim-witness advocate with the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office, an association that continued for 29 years until Thursday, when she retired.

Read more about her remarkable service in Friday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.