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She believes her brother’s daughter is innocent of crime
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Lena Cooper has told reporters, police and others multiple times that she doesn’t believe her niece, Bresha Meadows, killed Jonathan Meadows Sr. in the family’s Hunter Street home in 2016. Now she’s offering a $5,000 reward with the hope that someone will come forward and tell what they know.
Jonathan Meadows was Cooper’s brother and Bresha’s father. Bresha, 14 at the time of her father’s death and now 17 and a high school graduate, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in his shooting death.
She was placed in the Trumbull County Juvenile Justice Center the night of the murder, July 28, 2016, and remained there about a year, then spent six months in a Cleveland mental health facility before being released back home with her mother in early 2018.
“I don’t have any hate for [Bresha],” Cooper said by telephone Friday. “We need to know the truth. I don’t believe she killed my brother.”
Cooper said she didn’t say anything at first when she learned that Bresha was charged with her brother’s death because authorities seemed to believe she did it.
But viewing the videotaped interviews police conducted with the people in the home that night left her with many questions.
Bresha never gave police an interview. Her mother did the talking, but when a Warren police detective left the room, as the video camera rolled, Bresha told her mother she didn’t remember killing her father.
But several days later and in the months to come, Brandi Meadows told reporters that Bresha told her “Now mommy, you’re free,” suggesting that Bresha did remember killing her father and did it to save her mother from the abuse of Jonathan Meadows Sr.
Cooper thinks they told that story to support the story that Bresha killed her father. Cooper added she thinks Bresha took the blame for the killing because they expected her to get little to no punishment for the crime.
From viewing the videotaped interviews, Cooper saw for herself that the people close to her brother did not allege her brother was abusive until a couple of weeks after he died, she said.
People with information about the killing are asked to call the private investigative company Chagrin Solutions at 440-645-3734 to report it.
Capt. Robert Massucci, chief of detectives for the Warren Police Department, answered “absolutely,” when asked whether his department would reopen the investigation if it receives useful information. Lena Cooper’s son compiled clips of the police interviews that can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmvPOPGyKIY