YOUNGSTOWN — Elizabeth White, mother of assumed murder victim Glenna J. White, testified Tuesday that she was not able to look for her missing daughter because she herself was arrested on a warrant when she called police to report her daughter missing.

She was the first witness in the aggravated murder trial of Robert L. Moore, who is charged with Glenna’s death. Glenna, 16, of Smith Township, went missing June 3, 2009, after leaving a home on Alden Avenue near Alliance late June 2, 2009, with Moore, 52, who returned to the Alden Avenue home alone an hour or so later with blood and mud on his clothing, prosecutors say.

Elizabeth White called Alliance police when she realized Glenna was missing June 3, but Alliance police said White should call another law enforcement agency, so Elizabeth called the Stark County Sheriff’s Office to report her daughter missing.

But Elizabeth White had outstanding warrants for unpaid fines and was taken to the Stark County Jail, she said.

While she was in jail for three to four days, she continuously called her mother to ask whether Glenna had been found, but her mother said no.

Glenna’s body has never been found.

Tuesday was the first day of testimony in the trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. The trial resumes today before Judge Maureen Sweeney and is expected to last more than a week.

Lots of police officers are on the witness list, including ones from Alliance, Stark County, Portage County and Smith Township in Mahoning County. The break in the Glenna White cold case came in 2020, when an investigator with the Portage County Sheriff’s Office received a tip that led him to further investigation. Alliance is located both in Stark and Mahoning counties and is close to Portage and Columbiana counties.

After Elizabeth White got home from jail, attempts were made to find clues as to what happened to Glenna on Glenna’s computer. But after that, Elizabeth said she became “too depressed to do anything” and sat on the couch for a week. Elizabeth testified that she and Glenna both had mental health issues.

Elizabeth White, 50, who lives in Alliance, said during the first 10 years of Glenna’s life, she was not a very good mother and suffered from manic depression and anxiety and drank a lot.

She took Glenna for a mental health assessment in the fall of 2008, and it showed that Glenna had “dissociative identity disorder” and had about 20 “different personalities” that took control of her personality “from time to time, depending on her mood and what was going on.” Glenna had “heard voices” since she was a young child, Elizabeth said.

Some of her behaviors were reckless, and she would be “moody, angry, irritable,” Elizabeth agreed under questioning by Rob Andrews, assistant county prosecutor. Glenna had run away from home two times and had post-traumautic-stress disorder, Elizabeth said.

On June 2, Glenna asked to go to a party at a home on Alden Avenue, but Elizabeth told her no and told her to be home by 7 or 8 p.m., Elizabeth testified. Glenna asked Elizabeth’s boyfriend, Jason Nuzum, and he also said no, Elizabeth said. Glenna told her mother she was already at the party and was not leaving.

Moore was the boyfriend of the woman who lived at the house, Deanna Shrive, prosecutors have said.

Nuzum and another male went to get Glenna the night Glenna disappeared, but they did not return with her, and she never saw her daughter again, Elizabeth said.

Much of the testimony after that focused on instances in which various people indicated they had seen Glenna alive after June 3, 2009, but Elizabeth said she got into the habit of telling people not to bring such stories to her anymore unless they had a photo of her daughter to prove it.

She said one reason she does not believe Glenna is still alive is because “my daughter would have never left my mother.”