43
Trumbull prosecutor opposes parole for three prison inmates
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins is opposing parole for three men due for parole hearings in October.
Gregory Click, 53, was a Champion Township resident in 1994 when he was convicted of attempted rape, attempted aggravated murder, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery in an attack on a woman, 75, of Herner County Line Road in Southington Township.
Judge John M. Stuard sentenced Click to 13 to 75 years in prison in October 1994.
The victim spent weeks in the hospital after the attack and was later released to a nursing home. She was beaten badly about the head with swelling shutting her eyes and bruising over her legs and shoulders,
She lived three more years after the attack and suffered “horrendous pain,” according to Watkins and Vindictor files.
Click, then 30 years old, had done yard work for the victim in the weeks before the attack.
In the letter to the parole board recently, Watkins wrote that Click has a “penchant for re-offending” and showed “extreme violence and lack of humanity” toward the 75-year-old victim.
Click has not completed or started a comprehensive sex offender program or victim-awareness education and failed to complete a recommended anger management program, Watkins added. Click has been written up six times for prison violations since 2009.
“The court gave this inmate a maximum sentence date of 2059 for good reason,” Watkins wrote. Please continue to keep society safe by his continued imprisonment,” Watkins wrote.
Watkins is also opposing parole for Henry G. Rockwell, 74, who killed two men in 1981 at his home in Champion Township.
Rockwell was 38 and living on Mahoning Avenue in July 1981 when he killed the men in a drug-related confrontation. He’s been in prison for 36 years.
Rockwell was sentenced in October 1981 to 15 years to life on each of two counts of murder in the deaths of Frank Mancinelli, 39, of Warren, and Seymore Gillman, 52, of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Both men had been shot in the head at the Mahoning Avenue residence, a short distance south of state Route 305. Their bodies were found in the trunk of Gillman’s Cadillac, which was found burning on state Route 82 about one mile east of state Route 46.
Watkins said Rockwell’s “general behavior tract and the magnitude of his cold-blooded and brutal attack on the victims along with his personal hands-on approach in their subsequent mutilation and burning ... evinces to me that Rockwell has a sociopathic personality and could harm others in the future.”
Watkins also opposes parole for Gary A. Betz, 63, who killed Ronald Goche in Goche’s Newton Township tavern in 1977. Betz was paroled in 2007 after serving 30 years on a life prison sentence, but he went back to prison in January 2011 for violating his probation by committing drunken-driving offenses in 2010 and 2011 in Minerva.
“Gary Allen Betz must be warehoused for the rest of his natural life to protect the public,” Watkins said.
“This man has been busy with committing crime and harm to others since he was 11; it would be complete nonsense to release him again,” Watkins wrote.
Betz’s attorney told parole board members in 2007 that Betz has an autoimmune disease and wasn’t expected to live more than five more years, but the public was denied records that would have allowed it to evaluate the seriousness of his illness, Watkins said.