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Warren police treating death of man in remote area as possible homicide
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Warren police are treating the discovery of the body of a Laird Avenue Northeast man on the edge of Halladay Avenue Southwest on Saturday night as a possible homicide.
They identified the male Monday as Joseph C. Nall, 50.
Warren Police Chief Eric Merkel said when there is no obvious indication of what killed someone, detectives treat it as a possible homicide. Nall’s body was found under the Reserve Avenue bridge near Deemer Park.
A woman called 911 at 10:12 p.m., saying she spotted the body while driving through the nearly abandoned area just west of the former Warren Western Reserve High School and former Westlawn neighborhood. Both were demolished years ago.
The woman had driven to another part of the city by the time she called 911, prompting the 911 operator to ask her a number of questions about the exact location of the body.
“It’s like right in the middle. If you all go over there, you will probably see it, because I wasn’t walking or nothing. I was just riding by. It’s visible. I think it was a black male. His shirt was like half off,” she said.
The police report says the body was found a couple of minutes after the 911 call on the side of the roadway “with what appeared to be a jacket wrapped around his head.”
Detectives investigated, and the body was removed a few hours later. The Trumbull County Coroner’s office said an autopsy will be performed today in the county morgue at the Trumbull Regional Medical Center.
Nall appears to have had no Trumbull or Mahoning County felony record but was convicted of misdemeanor receiving stolen property 2010. He later failed to pay fines and costs and was held in contempt of court in 2013 and jailed for seven days. He was arrested again in June 2018, apparently related to the same case, and spent two more days in the county jail, according to court and jail records.
The location where his body was found is a short distance from where the body of Brittany D. May, 28, of Hamilton Street Southwest, was found last July. Her death was ruled a homicide as a result of gunshot wounds. No one has been arrested in the case.
The body of her boyfriend, Jerry Hughley, 35, also of Hamilton Street, was found about a mile away on Risher Road about a week later. He also had been shot, apparently about the same time as May, and there has been no arrest in his death, either.