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Trumbull charges accused drug dealer with death of alleged customer
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
For the third time in recent years, Trumbull County investigators have put together a criminal case charging an accused drug dealer with the involuntary manslaughter of one of his purported customers.
Maurice L. Bryant, 27, of Shady Lane in Howland, pleaded not guilty Friday to involuntary manslaughter in the April 10 overdose death of Megan Fitzgerald, 24, of Champion and six other drug-related charges.
Bryant’s arraignment took place before Judge W. Wyatt McKay of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court. Bryant is being held in the Trumbull County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bond.
Craig J. Liebal, 27, of Genessee Avenue Northeast, also pleaded not guilty, but his charges were trafficking in a counterfeit controlled substance and cocaine trafficking, and his bond is $5,000.
Liebal is not charged in Fitzgerald’s death, but the Bryant investigation turned up Liebal’s purported offenses, said Capt. Jeff Orr, commander of the Trumbull Ashtabula Group Law Enforcement Task Force, which conducted the investigation.
Sheriff Thomas Altiere and Orr conducted a news conference after the arraignments, saying Fitzgerald’s death was part of a spike in Trumbull County overdose deaths connected to the prescription drug fentanyl.
Between March 17 and April 20, seven county residents died to fentanyl overdoses, Orr said.
TAG, which operates under the direction of Orr and the sheriffs of Trumbull and Ashtabula County, took “a very aggressive approach” to tracing the origin of the fentanyl that killed Fitzgerald, Altiere said.
“We’re looking at overdoses as a homicide,” Altiere said.
Fentanyl is “significantly more powerful than heroin,” Orr said, though he declined to speculate on whether Fitzgerald knew what drug she was taking when she died.
Orr sounded the alarm on the spike in overdose deaths in early April and called a meeting of law-enforcement agencies to ask them to begin to investigate overdose deaths as a crime, meaning gathering information helpful to prosecuting someone for the death.
“The day we went to the meeting, we shared this obituary notice with them,” Orr told the media Friday, holding up the photo and obituary information for Fitzgerald, who was a hairdresser at Famous Hair in Champion for seven years before her death.
One reason the investigation of the Fitzgerald case was successful was because there was evidence at the scene to gather, Orr said. “We’re looking at every case where we have evidence for,” Orr said.
The most-recent case involving criminal charges being filed in an overdose death was that of Joshua Robbins, 25, of Mineral Ridge, who died in 2014 after being injected with heroin by Mark Thornsberry, 26, of Niles.
Thornsberry was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter, tampering with evidence and corrupting another with drugs.
In 2013, James Patterson, 28, of Youngstown was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling the fatal dose of heroin to Christine Sheesley of Girard on her 17th birthday in April 2012.
Tyler Stevens, 20, of Girard got a five-year-prison term for injecting the heroin into Sheesley.