YOUNGSTOWN — Darrell Jackson Sr. testified Tuesday during the Stevie A. Ballard aggravated murder trial that he heard Ballard threaten to kill his son, Darrell N. Jackson, 20, a couple of months before his son was killed by gunfire on the South Side.

Ballard, 23, of Campbell, is on trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on aggravated murder and other charges in the Jan. 22, 2022, death of Jackson. The trial before Judge Anthony Donofrio continues this morning. If convicted of aggravated murder, Ballard would get a life prison sentence.

Jackson Sr. told jurors he was in bed with his son’s mother, Erika Gilbert, who was talking to Ballard on her cellphone. The phone was not on speaker, but Jackson still could hear what Ballard was saying. He heard Ballard tell Gilbert, “I don’t give a (deleted). I’m killing him.” Gilbert and her family had been close to members of Ballard’s family, Jackson Sr. said.

Jackson Sr. clarified later, “I heard him say over the phone he was going to kill my son.”

Jackson Sr. said Gilbert called him a couple of times the afternoon his son was killed. He called her back while he was at a gas station on Market Street, and Gilbert told him, “‘There’s a car on Market Street and somebody dead, and it looked like it was Darrell’s car,’ so I just panicked and jumped in the car and drove there real fast on Market Street,” he testified.

The location was Market Street at Hylda Avenue, where the younger Jackson’s car was found against a building behind a former bank.

“When I arrived on the scene, I saw that it was my son’s car, and I just immediately started screaming his name,” he said. He told a detective who was there that Stevie Calhoun was the person who killed his son. He did not know Stevie Ballard’s last name but knew Ballard’s father’s last name was Calhoun.

Jackson Sr. said the Stevie Calhoun he was talking about was Ballard, whom Jackson Sr. had known as a boy, when Ballard and his son were friends.

Under cross examination by defense attorney Mark Lavelle, Jackson Sr. said he did not know Ballard or most of his son’s friends as they got older because Jackson Sr. had been in prison for about 10 years ending in 2011.

Jackson Sr. said he also did not know whether his son had been friendly with Ballard and never knew the reason Ballard said he wanted to kill his son.

Youngstown police had provided very little information about Darrell N. Jackson Jr.’s death at the time of the killing. Later it was learned that Jackson was shot to death in a vehicle that drove onto the sidewalk at Market Street and East Philadelphia Avenue and the vehicle had multiple bullet holes in it.

Ballard was indicted in the killing and specifications of a drive-by shooting and possessing a weapon that could add five years to his sentence if convicted.

But during opening statements Tuesday, Rob Andrews, assistant county prosecutor, told jurors that the episode began when the city’s ShotSpotter system alerted police to shots fired at Market and Philadelphia.

He said a citizen also called 911 to report a shooting, and a Youngstown police officer found a black Nissan in the parking lot of an abandoned bank. There were bullet holes in the drivers’s side door, and the driver’s door window was broken out. Former Youngstown Patrolman John O’Neill, who testified Tuesday, said he found Jackson, 20, inside the car, unresponsive.

Then Jackson Sr. arrived at the scene and told them, “That’s my son. Stevie Calhoun killed my son,” Andrews said. Three days later, police got a tip that the shooting took place near the Gold Exchange, a short distance south of where Jackson’s car crashed into a building.

At the Gold Exchange, police viewed surveillance video that shows a gold Honda with tinted windows pull up next to Jackson’s Nissan. Someone in the back seat fired at the Nissan and continued onto Southern Boulevard.

The Nissan slowly drifted down Market Street to the former parking lot. Police learned that Ballard has a girlfriend with a gold Honda. Then on Feb. 1, 2022, Liberty police notified Youngstown police that they had stopped Ballard’s girlfriend in the gold Honda, and Youngstown police took possession of the car and analyzed it for evidence.

Inside the gold Honda was a folder containing an application for Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority, letters addressed to Ballard, as well as Ballard’s Social Security card. They also found a receipt for a Family Dollar store from earlier Jan. 22, 2022. Police later viewed surveillance video showing that Ballard was the person who shopped at the store that day in the gold Honda.

A Youngstown police crime scene investigator testified later Tuesday to the testing done on the Honda, but he did not provide the results of the gunshot residue testing. Andrews told jurors that the testing indicated that gunshot residue was on the passenger window of the Honda.

Andrews acknowledged that prosecutors cannot prove who the shooter of Darryl N. Jackson was. “We know the defendant was in that car and he was a participant in this. Was he the driver? Was he the shooter? It does not matter.”

He said the complicity law in Ohio means that a person participating in a murder is held just as responsible for a killing whether he or she pulled the trigger or just aided another in the killing, Andrews said.

In defense’s opening statement, Lavelle said, “We don’t know who was in the car at 1:30 in the afternoon. We don’t know what the plan was.” He called the prosecution’s case a “scattered effort,” because Ballard was in the gold Honda earlier that morning.