Prosecutors call Hamad's defense motion a distraction

WARREN — Prosecutors say an attempt by Nasser Hamad and his attorney to have a special prosecutor appointed to his case are an effort to “distract from the fact that [Hamad] murdered two people and attempted to murder three others.”

Hamad’s attorney, Geoffrey Oglesby, filed a motion March 16 asking Judge Ronald Rice of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court to appoint a special prosecutor and empanel a grand jury.

The purpose of both would be to prosecute the three people who survived a conflict at Hamad’s house Feb. 25 in which one of the three engaged in a fist fight with Hamad in Hamad’s front yard.

Police said after the fist fight was over, Hamad, 47, went in his house on state Route 46 in Howland, retrieved a handgun, went back outside and fired it about 18 times at the five, who had returned to their van near the street. Two died and three were injured.

Prosecutors said in a filing Friday that Hamad’s repeated attempt in court filings to place blame on the five for the killings misses the point that the five didn’t know when they went to Hamad’s house that they would encounter gunfire.

“In fact, just the opposite, [Hamad] repeatedly challenged the victims to come to his home to engage in a fight,” prosecutors said.

“[Hamad] told them he didn’t need a gun. And in fact the only person who brought a gun into this case remains [Hamad] after the fist fight had ended. Not one of the victims had a firearm,” prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said there was no “legal foreseability on the part of the victims that anyone would be injured, maimed or killed by a firearm,” so there is “no legal basis to have any of the victims charged with anything other than possibly misdemeanor assault.”

In fact, the hand injury Hamad suffered “could very well have been caused by him striking one of the victims or possibly even self-inflicted in an attempt to create the illusion that he was injured by the victims,” the proseuctors said.

Furthermore, “the Ohio Supreme Court has long recognized the discretion of the prosecution in similar cases and found the failure to prosecute others is not ‘selective prosecution,’” prosectors said in the filing.