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Body found on East Side identified as teen missing since last week
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
The Mahoning County Coroner’s office Wednesday was able to identify a body found Tuesday afternoon in a heavily wooded area of the East Side as a missing teen.
A news release from the coroner’s office said the death of Savon Williams, 17, of Caledonia Street, also on the East Side, is ruled a homicide from a gunshot wound to the head.
Williams’ death is the third homicide in the city in 2017. At this point in 2016, Youngstown had two homicides.
Family members flocked to the crime scene Tuesday because they said they received phone calls from people saying Williams was the person found.
Detectives questioned several members of Williams’ family Tuesday evening but would not confirm to them that the body was Williams. The coroner’s office said it was able to confirm the identity after an autopsy, and by family members who were able to describe certain aspects of Williams’ appearance in detail.
Williams’ mother, Shanell Echols, filed a missing persons report about 10 p.m. Friday, saying her son had left home about 6 p.m. Thursday to go to a friend’s house and never came back.
She told police and a Vindicator reporter she spoke with Monday that one of the reasons she was so worried about her son was because his phone went straight to voice mail and there was no activity on his social media accounts for about 24 hours.
Williams’ body was found by two men who were walking on Wardle Avenue near Dudley Avenue and saw something strange off the road. They alerted the owner of a nearby junk yard, who walked up to the scene, found Williams and called police.
Echols said Wednesday she had compiled some information on her son’s disappearance and given it to police. She said she wanted the person who killed her son caught.
“I just want them to investigate this and see what happened,” Echols said. “I was doing my own investigation and gave the information to the police and everything.”
Juvenile court records show Williams was put on probation twice in 2015 for theft and criminal damaging and served about five months in detention on a carrying a concealed weapon charge in 2016.
Echols said her son was not a “bad kid.”
“He hung with a couple of people he maybe shouldn’t have been hanging with, but he was a good kid,” Echols said.
Detectives said they had no new information on the case.