YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — The suspect in a shooting death last week on the North Side will now have his case heard by a Mahoning County grand jury.
Elijah May, 19, of Youngstown, waived a preliminary hearing Thursday in municipal court on charges of voluntary manslaughter and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Both charges were bound over to the grand jury by Judge Renee DiSalvo.
May was arrested shortly after the April 11 shooting death of Ray’mon Sims, 22.
Police said Sims was shot on Crandall Avenue, drove five blocks before crashing into a house at Alameda and Guadalupe avenues, then ran to a yard on Crandall Avenue, where he collapsed and was found by police.
Sims later died from his wounds at St. Elizabeth Health Center.
Also arrested on a robbery charge in connection with the case Wednesday was Vincent Steele, 19, who is charged with complicity to robbery, a second degree felony. U.S. Marshals picked him up at a house on Patricia Drive in Girard. He is expected to be arraigned Friday in municipal court.
Chief of Detectives Capt. Jason Simon said that Steele was in the car with Sims and the two had robbed May. The robbery preceded the shooting, Simon said.
Simon said police do not yet want to go into specifics of the case, but he said May was charged with voluntary manslaughter because investigators believe the circumstances of the case fit that charge.
The Ohio Revised Code says a person commits voluntary manslaughter when a suspect is “under a sudden fit of passion or a sudden fit of anger.”
May also had a hearing on an unrelated probation violation on a menacing charge from 2022 where he failed to complete a mental health assessment and anger management counseling. His attorney, Robert Harvey, told the judge his client’s girlfriend lost the child she was carrying and a brother died.
May told the judge he had been homeless but managed to get a place to live and things were getting better before the shooting in which he is charged.
Judge DiSalvo held off on sentencing May for the probation violation until she can hear from May’s probation officer. She did, however, appear to be taken aback by May’s youth.
“You’re 19 years old,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re a baby.”
An addendum to the original report of the shooting said that as Sims was being treated at the hospital, someone told hospital police there was a handgun in a trash can. Officers looked and found a .45-caliber handgun that was wrapped up in a carpet that was stuffed in a trash can. Police took the gun for evidence.
