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Reported rapes in Warren on the rise
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Reported rapes in Warren have risen in each of the last two years, while homicides dropped this year, according to Warren Police Department statistics.
The rise in rape reports – about 22 percent more in 2014 than in 2013 and another 18 percent so far this year – doesn’t surprise Nick Carney, who investigates them for the Warren Police Department.
“A lot of it has to do with – a lot of sexual assaults we have are children, and the children are coming forward more than in the past,” he said.
Carney believes victims – roughly 80 percent are children – are comfortable reporting the assaults because “we have a good track record of prosecuting the offender between the Warren Police Department, [Trumbull County] Children Services and the municipal and common-pleas prosecutors.”
Carney said prosecuting offenders “brings some closure to the families when the perpetrator is sentenced appropriately for his crimes.”
Most rapes involve children being victimized by a close family member or a close friend of the family – “someone close to them,” Carney said.
Warren police statistics list 37 forcible rape reports in 2013, 45 in 2014 and 40 during the first eight months of 2015.
Gabe Wildman, assistant Trumbull County prosecutor, said he’s seen an increase in rapes committed by juveniles in the five years he’s been prosecuting child sexual assaults.
The most common type involves assaults committed by a juvenile who is either larger or older than the victim, oftentimes a family member. The majority of crimes of this type are never reported, however, Wildman noted.
Meanwhile, Warren has had one of the most surprising years in a long time for homicides.
There still are four months left in 2015, but there has been just one homicide recorded: Teajuanna J. McKimmon, 37, was charged with murder after purportedly shooting her boyfriend, Rayen L. Patterson, 44, to death June 6 at his house on Oak Circle Southwest. Her case is pending with the Trumbull County grand jury, and she remains free on bond.
Warren has had as few as four homicides in recent years, but there were nine in 2013 and eight in 2014.
Warren Police Chief Eric Merkel says he believes several initiatives he and others have instituted could be helping keep those numbers down.
One is the Safe Neighborhoods Initiative from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office that kicked off at the end of 2013 in Warren and has called in its fourth group of people thought to be at high risk for committing crimes.
The offenders have heard from law enforcement about the risks of continuing to offend and been advised that law enforcement knows who they are and will act forcefully to send them to prison in the future. They also are advised of ways to get out of that life.
Merkel said the message of those talks is “We know who you are, straight up.”
“We have a list of 100 people who are the most at-risk of gun crimes,” the chief said, adding that the assistant Ohio attorney general helped the department establish that list.
“Some of the guys have relocated,” Sgt. Gary Riggins of the Warren Police Department said of Warren-area offenders. Riggins works with the Street Crimes Unit and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Some of the work he’s been doing in the past few years has been to collect a database through the state of shell casings and weapons so that when shell casings turn up at a crime scene, there is a way to learn more about the history of the guns involved.
The department also keeps guns for safekeeping for 30 days when they come into the police Department’s possession so that they can be entered into a national ballistics database to trace where those weapons were purchased, and how often they were sold.
That helps identify individuals who may be selling weapons to people who are not permitted to have them, Riggins said.
“Our intelligence database has increased 10-fold in the last two years,” Merkel said.
Working with federal prosecutors has produced a number of long prison sentences in the federal prison system, Merkel and Riggins added. In most cases, they are the result of someone having an accumulation of weapons, drugs and violence convictions.