YOUNGSTOWN — The 14-year-old boy accused of shooting a 12-year-old boy Sunday night on the South Side in an attempt to steal the younger boy’s expensive shoes is now charged with attempted murder and aggravated robbery with gun specifications.

The alleged shooter, Makhi Cotton, appeared before Mahoning County Juvenile Court Magistrate Karen Romano Melone on Tuesday to be told the charges he faces and to learn that he will remain in juvenile detention pending his next hearing. No new court date was available as of Tuesday afternoon.

The magistrate also advised him that because he is 14, he is subject to a mandatory binder to the adult level common pleas court if Judge Theresa Dellick finds probable cause that the boy committed the attempted murder and aggravated robbery.

For his part, Makhi politely answered “Yes, Ma’am” the several times the magistrate asked him if he understood the charges he faces. This was his initial hearing, he had no lawyer and the magistrate advised him this was not the time to talk about the case. When the magistrate asked his mother whether the boy needed a court appointed lawyer, she said, “I guess appoint one for now.”

When the hearing began, the magistrate indicated that a juvenile detention guard should remove the boy’s handcuffs for the hearing, but Anisa Modarelli, assistant county prosecutor, said it’s her policy to recommend that handcuffs remain on “when someone is charged with a potential murder.”

The boy, of Youngstown, is accused of shooting the 12-year-old at 8:45 p.m. Sunday on Gibson Street near Cambridge Avenue in an attempt to steal the shoes the 12-year-old was wearing.

Capt. Jason Simon, head of the Youngstown Police detective division, said the shoes cost about $1,000. He said the “14-year-old wanted the shoes and was going to take them by any means necessary. In this case he shot at, injured the 12-year-old, didn’t get the shoes and ran away from the scene.”

The boy was in stable condition after the shooting, Simon said. It appears the boys knew each other, but they were not “friends, enemies, anything like that. I think they knew of each other,” he said.

The alleged shooter was identified during an investigation and was arrested sometime later. Makhi was taken to the Martin P. Joyce Juvenile Justice Center, where he has remained.

It’s not the first time Makhi has been in trouble with the law, having been detained there 88 days earlier this spring and summer as a result of being charged with several felonies and misdemeanors, according to juvenile court documents and court officials.

He was charged April 16 with grand theft of a motor vehicle, felony assault and possessing criminal tools, all low-level felonies, and misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, two counts of resisting arrest and one count of criminal damaging.

The most serious of the charges, a fourth-degree felony assault, alleged that Makhi caused or tried to cause physical harm to a woman who was working as a peace officer, investigator or person performing emergency medical service in their official duties.

A lesser felony of possessing criminal tools, alleged that Makhi possessed a screwdriver “with the purpose to use it criminally.”

A judgment entry describing the outcome of Makhi’s earlier case has not been finalized yet, so the details on how the case was resolved were not available Tuesday afternoon, but the court decided to release Makhi from juvenile detention Aug. 8 and place him on probation in that case, court officials said.

When the hearing was over, Makhi’s mother walked past a reporter and said, “He should have never been released.”

The woman, who declined to provide her name, later told a reporter outside of the juvenile courthouse that Makhi was in and out of the juvenile detention center three times during the course of the earlier criminal case, and she urged Romano Melone to keep her son in juvenile detention rather than send him home or to a relative’s house.

She had to decide Aug. 8 whether to have Makhi placed with a family member “and have him freely roaming the streets or take him home with me and try to have them come into the home and help out. I made that decision to let him come home,” she said.

In the June-July time frame the juvenile court put Makhi on house arrest, but there was no way to keep him at home, so she called probation officials in the juvenile court, and they told her to call police. She called police, but they would not pick him up, she said.

Makhi’s mother said Makhi has “some major mental-health issues,” and his mental health was recently evaluated.

An April 18, 2024, judgment entry from Magistrate Romano Melone states that she ordered a mental health and competency evaluation by the Forensic Center of Northeast Ohio in Austintown. Court officials said Makhi was deemed to be competent, meaning he was competent enough to face the juvenile court legal process.