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Trumbull victim-witness advocate retires after 29 years
By Ed Runyan
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 Raymond’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.
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. So even though Fife was a member of her neighborhood block watch and a member of the parent-teacher organization, she had no idea Hill had committed sex crimes against a teenage girl and an adult woman not far from her home.
“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.
Fife also went to Columbus in 1986 to testify before the Ohio Legislature to ask that victims of offenses committed by juveniles be allowed to speak at the offender’s trial and sentencing — a change that did ultimately take place.
Gradually, other laws changed that gave the public better access to information about juvenile offenses.
Meanwhile, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins understood that Miriam Fife could speak to victims of crime in a way that few people could. When grant funds became available, he put her on the payroll.
“Her ability to identify with crime victims is incomparable because she is the ultimate crime victim herself,” Judge McKay said.
She agrees that having experienced so much because of her son’s death allowed her to relate to the pain experienced by other victims.
“When people can relate to you, they know you can understand the story,” she said.
Her husband, Ike, died in 2006. She has seven surviving children, including three stepsons.
She has no specific plan for how she will spend her time in retirement, but she plans to continue raising the Victim’s Flag in front of the Trumbull County jail whenever a person under age 18 dies as a result of violence.
The flag raisings are part of her 25-year association with the Trumbull County chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, which she and two others started in 1989.
But it will be hard for her to stay home when people are hurting, she said.
Over the years, numerous people have contacted her from Mahoning and Columbiana counties, Cleveland and Western Pennsylvania. She talks to them because she wants to help, regardless of where they live.
“Victims have said just talking to me has given them strength,” she said. “They call me because they know this happened to me. They want information and consolation. The most important thing, I think, is just listening to them.
“If, in 10 years, they call me and they’re still grieving — which we all are — but if they are still grieving, I may be the only person who still listens ... because their friends and relatives are tired of hearing. They think they should get over it, and that doesn’t happen.”