What shattered lives of Bresha Meadows, family

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Bresha Meadows recorded interviews

Video

The recorded conversation between Brandi Meadows and Bresha Meadows at the police station shortly after the killing of Jonathan R. Meadows Sr. on July 28, 2016. On August 15, 2016, Brandi Meadows talked with Warren PD again.

Guided by her mother, Bresha Meadows, 14, refused a police interview July 28, 2016, about the death of her father, who was shot as he slept in their Hunter Street Northwest home that morning.

Her mother, Brandi Meadows, did the talking that morning, making the initial 911 call, talking to detective John Greaver and spending about two hours with Bresha in a recorded interview room at the Warren police station.

Brandi, 41, told Greaver she was sleeping on the floor next to Jonathan Meadows Sr., 41, when she awoke to a “boom,” then saw Bresha holding a gun and saw her husband fatally wounded on the couch. No one reported seeing the actual shooting.

In Brandi’s 3:20 a.m. 911 call, she said Bresha had killed her father.

It was a killing that shocked the community because of Bresha’s age and because it involved her own father. It made headlines around the world and additional coverage in the weeks to come when allegations surfaced that Bresha killed to save her family from her father’s abuse.

“My daughter – she has mental issues – and she just shot my husband in the [deleted] head,” Brandi told the 911 operator. “Oh my God. I can’t live without him.”

The recorded conversation between Brandi and Bresha at the police station shortly after the killing and interviews with other Meadows family members by detectives provide insight into the Meadows family, including substance abuse and a history of domestic violence by Jonathan Meadows Sr. against his wife.

But the interviews, recently obtained by The Vindicator in a public records request, also show how Meadows family members and others said little about Jonathan Meadows Sr. being hard on his children when they were interviewed the first morning.

It was only in the weeks to come and during a second set of interviews Aug. 15 that the descriptions of him turned criminal, including allegations that he raped Bresha. It’s what Lena Cooper, a sister of his, called “character assassination.”

The assistant prosecutor in the case said he attributes the change to an effort by the Meadows family and a few others to give Bresha an excuse for killing her father.

A police captain says the thin evidence of a motive for Bresha to kill her father even called into question whether she was even the killer.

Last May, Bresha pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter before Trumbull County Juvenile Court Judge Pam Rintala and was sentenced to two more months of incarceration on top of the 10 months she’d already served. She is now in a Cleveland mental-health facility, where she will remain until sometime in January.

If Bresha, now 16, makes adequate progress, she will be released back into society at that point, though it’s unknown with whom she will live since the judge said it wasn’t clear whether Brandi Meadows could provide a stable home.

Because of the unusual nature of the murder case, which was prosecuted in Trumbull County Juvenile Court, The Vindicator sought and then viewed the interviews the Warren Police Department conducted with witnesses.

Striking statements

One of the most striking statements made in the hours of interviews was by Bresha Meadows when she was in the interview room of the Warren Police Department.

“I didn’t even know I did it,” Bresha told her mother of the killing. It was during an emotional period when Bresha and her mother hugged and cried while alone. It appeared the two knew they were being audio recorded. They also were being video recorded.

Brandi Meadows refused to allow Greaver to interview Bresha, but there were long periods when Bresha and Brandi were in the room alone, talking. Over the course of nearly two hours, Greaver read Bresha her rights and took DNA and gunshot-residue samples from her and her mother.

Also while they were alone, Bresha repeatedly apologized to her mother for killing her father.

In one exchange, Brandi said to Bresha: “I don’t know why you did this.”

“I don’t know either,” Bresha replied.

“Is he dead?” Bresha asked.

“Yes,” Brandi said.

“I didn’t mean to. What’s wrong with me?” Bresha said.

“He pushed everybody hard,” Brandi said.

“Did you plan this?” Brandi asked.

“No. No.” She added, “I didn’t mean it. I was just angry.”

Brandi repeatedly told Bresha not to talk to police about the incident and not to talk to anybody in the Trumbull County Juvenile Justice Center when she went there later that morning. It appeared Brandi was hoping for Bresha to be released right away, but she ended up staying locked up for a year.

“Like I told them, Daddy was very verbally abusive,” Brandi told Bresha.

While on the phone with one of her sisters, Brandi said: “We need help. Bresha shot Johnny in the head and killed him.”

She added later, “She wasn’t in her right mind. She was blank-faced. I looked at her and said, ‘Bresha, what did you do?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Brandi continued, “I told them [Jonathan Sr.] was very controlling.”

The couple had been married 22 years and worked together delivering newspapers in Trumbull County and delivering phone books in the Cleveland area.

Interview after interview and earlier police reports described Jonathan as extremely jealous. He did not allow his wife out of his sight, did not allow her to have her own cellphone. They did everything together.

On July 9, 2011, Brandi took her children and fled the home. She filed for a protection order against Jonathan Sr., saying if Jonathan Sr. finds them, “I am 100 percent sure he will kill me and the children.”

Brandi said her husband had regularly threatened her and accused her of cheating.

He also had cut her, broken her bones and blackened her eyes, she said. She took the children back home a few months later, and Judge Rintala dismissed her protection order in September 2011 at Brandi’s request.

Bresha arrested

Police arrested Bresha Meadows, based upon information gained the morning of the murder, but they were not convinced she was the killer.

Even now, six months after Bresha was sentenced for her father’s death, the Warren Police Department’s chief of detectives, Robert Massucci, said he’s not convinced she was the killer, though he believes she was involved.

Bresha’s attorney, Ian Friedman of Cleveland, said he and Bresha have “never disputed” that she was the killer.

By the afternoon of July 28, 2016, Martina Latessa, Brandi’s aunt from Cleveland, who is a Cleveland police officer who investigates domestic violence, told reporters who had gone to the Hunter Street residence that Jonathan Meadows Sr.’s death was the result of “20 years of abuse” in the household by him.

Another sister of Brandi’s, Gina Latessa, 50, of Cleveland, had reported to Warren police May 29, 2016, that the reason Bresha had run away from home that day was that her father is “an alcoholic that becomes very angry when he’s drunk and threatens her.”

The police report said Trumbull County Children Services opened a case into the matter at that point. The report said Bresha was going to stay with her aunt while the agency investigated.

Stanley Elkins, the prosecutor in Bresha’s case, told The Vindicator that Children Services indicated the allegations were “unsubstantiated.”

Shortly after the killing, attorney Friedman told reporters that Bresha experienced an “unimaginable nightmare on a daily basis” while living with her father.

The story went worldwide and attracted a social media following, leading to demonstrations in cities across the United States demanding that authorities “Free Bresha.”

By Aug. 15, when Meadows family members were interviewed a second time, Jonathan Meadows Sr. was described in much more abusive and criminal ways. Especially notable was the revelation by Brandi Meadows that Bresha said she’d been raped by her father.

That same day, Tanasia Simmons, 18, a close friend of Bresha’s sister, said Bresha had told her she’d been raped but not by whom. Simmons also was staying at the Meadows home the night of the shooting and was dating Bresha’s brother.

Massucci said recently investigators were skeptical of the explanation that Bresha killed her father because of abuse because there had been no record of any abuse against her before the killing.

“All of a sudden, sexual abuse comes up in an interview room after your dad’s death,” he said. “I find that less credible than if there’s been a history of what would cause that.

“What’s her motive?” detective Massucci said. “I don’t think we’ve ever uncovered why she would do it.”

Changing memories

One interview revealed an especially big change in how a family member remembered the morning of the shooting compared with two weeks later.

Bresha’s sister, Brianna, then 19, answered a specific question posed by detective Greaver in her first interview by saying she never saw a gun in Bresha’s hand after waking to the sound of gunfire at 3:20 a.m.

In the second interview two weeks later, Brianna Meadows described in detail seeing Bresha holding and pointing the gun and it being taken from her. Meadows family members said Jonathan Meadows Sr. typically slept with the gun under his pillow or couch cushion.

When Greaver interviewed Brandi Meadows within two hours of the killing, she talked about her husband being abusive toward Brandi. As for Bresha, Brandi said her husband had “threatened” Bresha but “never hit her.”

But in the Aug. 15 interview, Brandi dropped a bombshell, saying Bresha told Brandi in the hours after the killing for the first time ever that her father had raped her.

Brandi said Bresha revealed the abuse in the police department’s interview room while Bresha and Brandi were alone. Audio and video recording was taking place throughout their time in the interview room.

Prosecutor Elkins said recently that investigators reviewed the two hours of that recording, and investigators heard nothing that sounded like that conversation. Elkins said he thinks that story was fabricated to try to gain sympathy for Bresha and reduce her punishment.

Tanasia Simmons, Jonathan Meadows Jr.’s live-in girlfriend and Brianna Meadows’ good friend, told Detective Nick Carney July 28, 2016, that she and Jonathan Jr. were asleep in the basement when she heard a “boom,” then chaos on the first floor where Brandi and Jonathan Sr. had been sleeping.

She went to the second-floor bathroom to help Bresha.

“She was sleeping. That’s all she would tell me,” Simmons said of Bresha. “I put the shower on for her,” Simmons said, not explaining that Bresha was still clothed at the time.

Carney didn’t ask Simmons to explain the reason for the shower. Elkins later confirmed for reporters that police found Bresha fully clothed and wet from the shower. He said he didn’t know why that happened. But Brandi told Greaver, “They put her in the water to calm her down. She flipped out.”

Jonathan Meadows Sr.’s sister, Lena Cooper of Tennessee, told The Vindicator in May she thinks the reason Bresha got into the shower was to destroy evidence.

Cooper said she’s not convinced Bresha was the killer. She wonders if Bresha took the fall for someone else on the theory that no one would hold a 14-year-old girl with mental-health issues accountable for even the most horrible of crimes.

Though Bresha did not grant an interview to detective Greaver, she did speak to him briefly about the shower.

While Greaver was collecting the swabs of her hands, Bresha told him her hands “went under the tub water because I was trying to figure out if it was cold.”

Elkins and Friedman agree that Brandi’s DNA was on the gun but Bresha’s DNA was not.

Friedman said there are scientific reasons why Bresha’s DNA was not on the gun, such as “DNA covering other DNA.”

Cooper was not happy with the one-year sentence her niece got for the killing. Cooper said prosecutors told her to continue to provide information to them about the case in the event that it points to criminal behavior by anyone else.

Gun or no gun?

In the interview that Bresha’s sister, Brianna Meadows, gave to detective Greaver, she described waking to a “hard pow,” then seeing Bresha with a “blank stare on her face” just outside of the room where Brianna slept.

Brianna told Greaver she never saw Bresha holding a gun.

But on Aug. 15, Brianna said she did see it after waking up to a boom.

Elkins said he believes the second story is true, and Brianna didn’t mention seeing the gun the first time because she thought it would hurt her sister.

Attorney Friedman said there is “nothing surprising” about witnesses changing their story. “When you take people moments after a traumatic incident, their recollection quite often is distorted, even with the best intentions of recalling everything accurately.”

Friedman said it’s also common for stories about rape by a parent to change. “It is common because the most difficult thing that people can talk about is abuse at the hands of their parents.”

Friedman said the experts he hired all said the claims that Jonathan Meadows Sr. abused Bresha were genuine.

‘Saved her own family’

In her July 28 interview, Tanasia Simmons, a friend of the children, said she had “never witnessed [Jonathan Meadows Sr.] put his hands on his children,” but said he was “controlling” and “rude,” and said “He’s known to be a little loud when he drinks.”

In the second interview Aug. 15, Simmons brought up a new subject. She said Bresha told her Bresha had been raped. Simmons said she believed Bresha was accusing her father, but Bresha didn’t say so directly.

In this interview, Simmons described Jonathan Sr. having a serious drinking problem and smoking a large amount of marijuana. “The [drinking] is horrible. He drank everything from 110 proof E&J [Brandy] to everything,” she said.

She said he would smoke marijuana 12 times per day, two “blunts” at a time.

“I won’t say what [Bresha] did was right, but in my opinion, she saved her own family,” Simmons said of the murder.

Prosecutor Elkins said Tanasia’s comments were part of a cover-up.

“We know they were trying to cover it up, trying to protect [Bresha], I guess,” Elkins said.

Elkins believes Bresha was the shooter, but “murder cases are always open,” and anyone with information about additional crimes in the Meadows killing is encouraged to contact authorities, he said.