EDITOR’S NOTE: This is No. 7 of the Top 10 stories of the year as voted on by newsroom staff.

By ED RUNYAN

Staff writer

YOUNGSTOWN — Throughout 2024, the investigation and prosecution of the three men whose decision to commit a Sept. 21, 2020, robbery led to the death of Rowan Sweeney, 4, came to a head, as Brandon Crump Jr. went on trial and was convicted in February and was sentenced in July to 52 years to life in prison.

The case prosecutors presented in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in February was the culmination of 3 1/2 years of work by Struthers police, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office and others to ensure that the men responsible were held accountable and punished adequately.

There could be no mistakes, no excuses for anything less than Justice for Rowan, the phrase seen throughout the community after the boy was killed in an early-morning home-invasion robbery at a home in Struthers that ended in agony.

Signs saying “Justice for Rowan” were a reminder for years that a sweet little boy had been killed while he slept and his mother had begged the shooter not to hurt him.

Rowan’s father, David Sweeney, was not there when it happened. Rowan was with his mother, Alexis Schneider, Schneider’s boyfriend, Yarnell Green, and two people with drug and legal problems, Andre McCoy Jr. and Cassandra Marsicola, when McCoy helped set up and facilitated the robbery.

But apparently neither Crump nor the accomplice who drove Crump to the robbery, Kimonie Bryant, realized that Crump was capable of shooting and killing a little boy and also shooting all four adults in the home, including McCoy.

At the trial, Schneider, Marsicola and McCoy testified, but it turned out their credibility was not that great. Prosecutors were forced to admit that the drug use that went on in the home that night, the criminal history of McCoy and the changes in the recollections of the eyewitnesses made their testimony suspect.

Marsicola testified that she suffered from depression and was using Xanax and Percocets and drinking whiskey every day at the time of the killing. McCoy had been shot in the head during the robbery and testified that the injuries affected his memory.

But what prosecutors lacked in credible testimony from eyewitnesses they made up for with technology-based evidence.

The “star witness” in the trial was Michelle Smith, an analyst with Ohio HIDTA, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, who took locational data obtained from the cellphones of Bryant and Crump from the night of the killing and plotted it on a map in a way that any person could easily conclude that Bryant and Crump did, in fact, travel to the home on Perry Street that night at the very time the killing and shootings took place.

The maps Smith created also showed where the phones had been traveling in the hours before the shootings and afterward, just to provide other confirmatory information. That data and mapping also was powerful enough to catch Bryant in a lie when he tried to say that he never got any of the money that was stolen from the home that night.

Several of the people from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office’s BCI division testified at the trial to provide the more technical and scientific evidence behind the DNA collected at the scene and the type of gun used.

They also helped present the photos and videos recovered from the cell phones and social media accounts of people like Crump and Bryant, leading to one video showing Crump flashing a lot of cash in the hours after the robbery and killing took place. Prosecutors even argued that the denominations of the bills matched the cash that was stolen from Green.

When the jury came back with guilty verdicts on all counts for Crump, it was relief for prosecutors, the Struthers Police Department and Rowan’s family, including David Sweeney, who had attended many vigils, spoke to the public, organized a campaign to create a playground in his son’s memory and attended countless court hearings.

“I’m just so relieved that we got the guilty verdict,” he said after the verdict. “We’ve fought and worked so hard these past over three years to get to this point, and I’m really speechless right now.”

After Bryant and McCoy were sentenced to life prison sentences, Crump faced his punishment July 29 in a long and detailed hearing during which Judge Anthony D’Apolito explained the reasons he gave the now 21-year-old killer 52 years to life in prison and not more.

Crump was only 17 at the time he killed Rowan, meaning Crump was not eligible for the death penalty under Ohio law. And other Ohio laws set guidelines for when a juvenile who commits murder must be granted a parole hearing (in 25 years), the judge explained.

If he were to sentence Crump to 89 years to life, “clearly he would be much older than what most courts would look at as a lawful sentence,” the judge said.

After all of that was complete, all three defendants were shipped off to prison. But Crump’s appeals attorney has until Jan. 8 to file the main appeal document in Crump’s appeal before the 7th District Court of Appeals.

The notice of appeal filed by attorney Lou DeFabio, who represented Crump, states that one issue that probably will be raised in the appeal is pretrial publicity and the effect it had on seating a fair and impartial jury to hear Crump’s case.

But DeFabio also listed “Improper admission of other acts-type testimony — ballistic shell casings, insufficient evidence and manifest weight as to all counts, particularly conspiracy,” and “improper sentence and other sentencing issues” as issues likely to be raised on appeal.

The nonprofit Rowan Sweeney Memorial Foundation hosted a breakfast with crafts and story time with Santa and basket raffle Dec. 8 in Canfield, according to the foundation’s Facebook page.

The foundation has raised more than $135,000 so far toward creating Rowan’s Memorial Park and building an all-inclusive playground for people of all ages and abilities to also reflect his son’s love of playgrounds and parks. The project cost is estimated at $700,000.