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Man released in branding case sent back to prison
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Prison just makes Andrew Kocak worse, he says. Speaking at a parole- violation hearing in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on Thursday, the 34-year-old Kocak said every time he is sent there he comes back worse.
“Prison just makes me worse,” Kocak said. “[For]some people, it rehabs them or calms them down; it makes me worse every time.”
But prison is where Kocak is returning, where he will serve the remaining two years of a term for charges relating to the branding of a Struthers teen with a snuff can in November.
“I don’t think you’re ready for society,” Judge Lou D’Apolito told him.
He was granted judicial release by Judge D’Apolito on July 24 but a week later he was back in jail, charged with taking his mother’s car, stealing cash and electronics from her and threatening several family members who attended his judicial release who were fearful he would harm them if he was released from prison.
Kocak also served prison sentences in 2004 and 2009, according to court records.
Boardman police Detective Glenn Patton testified during the hearing that Kocak had written a 78-page manifesto where he described kidnapping an ex-girlfriend and her father and torturing and killing them. Patton also said several family members said after Kocak was released that they were afraid of him.
He was found with his mother’s car at an apartment in Warren, where he drank from a glass that contained a gram of heroin before he was arrested and he had to be taken to Valley Care Trumbull Memorial Hospital to be treated for a heroin overdose. Patton said Kocak was upset at family members who he think betrayed him.
“He felt that they had wronged him,” Patton said.
But Kocak said Thursday that police got the events wrong. He said he denied threatening anyone, the manifesto was really a book he was exchanging with the woman and that he stole items from his mother to buy drugs to kill himself.
“I was only intending to hurt me,” Kocak said.
Kocak said in the ambulance on the way to Trumbull Memorial, he had to be revived by Narcan.
For his conduct after he was released from prison, Kocak was indicted Thursday by a Mahoning County grand jury on charges of menacing by stalking, retaliation and theft.