North Lima lawyer hospitalized after being shot at home

Staff report

NORTH LIMA

A prominent local lawyer was admitted to St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital after being shot in the leg with a .38-caliber revolver at his Lynn Road residence and suffering a nonlife-threatening injury.

A woman shot Dale E. Bricker at 7:19 a.m. Wednesday after an argument, police say.

The argument was over how soon he was to take a dog, unfriendly to strangers, to a kennel before a carpet-installation estimator was to arrive at the house, said Carl Frost, Beaver Township police chief.

The woman has not been charged with any crime, but the case is being investigated as a felonious assault, and police are conferring with prosecutors, Frost said.

Any charges would be filed in Canfield court or directly presented to the Mahoning County grand jury, Frost said.

An Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation crime-scene unit was at the Bricker residence to investigate at the request of township police, said Jill Del Greco, a public information officer for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which oversees BCI. Del Greco would not comment on details of the case.

Sally Hammel, a spokeswoman for St. Elizabeth, said she had no information to release on Bricker’s condition, which she said could be due to his invoking patient privacy rights or no longer being in the hospital.

Bricker, 83, was recently honored by the Mahoning County Bar Association for 55 years as a lawyer.