Sentencing provides no closure for Alesha's mom

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

For Tiffany Knepper, the nightmare of the disappearance of her daughter, Alesha Bell, began July 23, 2015, in the street a short distance from their home in the Palmyra Heights neighborhood.

A neighbor later told Knepper he saw Bell, mother of a young son, getting into James Brooks’ pickup truck with two other people in the back seat.

It culminated Tuesday in the conviction of Brooks, 42, in Ashtabula County Common Pleas Court in Jefferson for the involuntary manslaughter, kidnapping and gross abuse of a corpse of Bell, who was barely 18 when she went missing.

For Knepper, Brooks’ hearing, plea and sentencing to eight years in prison didn’t come close to providing closure.

The 18 months of searching for her daughter, helping police track down leads and hearing bad news about the prostitution, drug dealing and weapons operation Brooks ran out of his home on U.S. Route 6 in Roaming Shores kept hurting her and her family.

When negotiations between the Ashtabula County Prosecutor’s Office and Brooks finally produced a plea agreement, Knepper and her children made the trip to Jefferson last Tuesday. Brooks made a few statements that have left Knepper guessing at their meaning.

“‘It wasn’t what you think.’ He would say something else and then he would say that again,” Knepper said of Brooks. “He wanted to make it very clear that it wasn’t what we think.” Brooks also said maybe someday he would be able to talk about everything that happened.

Did it mean Alesha is still alive?

“What we know can’t be denied – her remains,” Knepper said of bones found in a burn pit on Brooks’ property that were matched to Bell’s DNA.

“She’s not here, so with [Brooks] saying that ... are you saying that’s not my daughter, and she is still out here somewhere?”

“I don’t know what what part [Brooks] means ‘isn’t what we think,’ but that’s what came to my head when [Brooks] said that.”

Knepper said a part of her still believes Alesha is alive.

“This whole situation from beginning to end has been unreal. It’s hard to believe I’m living it. I sleep on the couch because I wait for her to come home,” Knepper said of her daughter.

Over the past 18 months, investigators have concluded that Brooks was running a prostitution ring that involved hotel rooms in Youngstown, Warren and Cleveland, said Taylor Cleveland, a detective with the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office.

Brooks, who once lived in Warren but whose parents also lived in Windsor, Ashtabula County, also distributed large amounts of drugs from his home in Roaming Shores, where he also bought and sold stolen firearms, Cleveland said. He also gave drugs to prostitutes.

In some instances, he dated women, then demanded that they prostitute for him. Police interviewed two such women who survived the experience, Cleveland said. Brooks is a suspect in the disappearance of three other women.

Brooks associated with people in California and Michigan and sent women there to engage in prostitution, Cleveland said. One woman was “drugged and sent to California,” the detective said.

The human trafficking and Bell’s murder are reasons federal officials prosecuted Brooks, Cleveland said. Brooks received a federal sentence of almost 22 years on drugs and weapons charges in August.

Cleveland said Brooks appeared to have been “infatuated” with Bell for several months before her abduction. The prostitution charge Brooks pleaded guilty to Tuesday did not involve Bell, Cleveland said.

If one of the theories investigators put forth is true, then Brooks may have tried to drug Bell and caused her death from an overdose, Knepper said.

“For someone who’s not on drugs and doesn’t do drugs, just a little bit could be too much,” Knepper said. “She did not do drugs at all.”

Knepper said it would be better to think that’s how her daughter died compared with other scenarios. “That would be one of the better thoughts instead of ... believing he might have tortured her the whole time.”