Muni court program urges 9 young criminals to choose life

YOUNGSTOWN

The nine young men lined up in municipal court Thursday were told the choice is theirs to live a better life.

“Stop the violence,” they were told repeatedly. The key to a better life, to staying out of prison, or the morgue at an early age, is theirs and theirs alone.

It might be awhile before the results are known, but the young men were participating in a Community Initiative To Reduce Violence call in at the municipal court.

The young men are people who already have some sort of criminal background, but officials want to impress on them the need to make better choices.

Law enforcement officials, including Chief Robin Lees and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Toepfer, spoke to the men as did a number of representatives from social service agencies to help them find housing, jobs and treatment for addiction, if necessary.

A man who goes by Demetrius, who was recently released after a 20-year prison stint for aggravated robbery and kidnapping, told the men they have to take advantage of the opportunity before them. The system, he said, is dispassionate and will send them to prison without hardly breaking a sweat if they get in serious trouble.

“It’s not you that they target, it’s not you that they dislike,” Demetrius said. “It’s the lifestyle that they hate.”

Mayor Jamael Tito Brown urged them during Black History Month to make not just a choice for history, but for their family’s history.

Lees showed the men crime scene pictures of a former CIRV member who participated in the call ins who did not return to the program. He wound up dead on a front porch on the South Side from several gunshot wounds, and the men viewed photos of his body on the porch. He died with his phone, his gun, his state ID card and Burney’s card in his wallet, Lees said.

Read more about the matter in Friday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.