Staff photo / Ed Runyan Family members of Gena Wade, who was slain in her Beloit home Oct. 26, are, from left, Richard Hashman; his fiance, Michelle Hively; and Carol Wade. They are pictured in front of Gena Wade’s home. Hively is Gena Wade’s sister; Carol Wade is Gena’s mother. Candy was Gena’s beloved dog, but Candy is cared for by Carol and other family members now.

BELOIT — Michelle Hively of Canton says she is frustrated that the efforts she and others made last year to address threats Nicholas Cunningham of Alliance made toward her family did not result in Cunningham being arrested or charged with a crime.

Hively said she thinks putting Cunningham, 32, behind bars could have stopped him from killing her sister, Gena M. Wade, 44, at Wade’s rural home on Courtney Road north of Beloit on Oct. 26.

“We are so hurt. We just want justice. First, it shouldn’t have happened, and now we want justice, and I feel like we can’t get there,” Hively said recently.

Hively said she feels like the public already has started to forget about her sister’s murder.

“We are living a nightmare. We are missing her so much,” she said.

Cunningham is in Heartland Behavioral Healthcare, a state mental hospital in Massillon, where he is being treated for mental illness in connection to the aggravated murder, aggravated burglary, violation of a protection order and other charges he faces in Gena Wade’s death. The Mahoning County Homicide Task Force charged Cunningham in November after it conducted a two-week investigation.

Cunningham was indicted Dec. 7 in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, and his attorney entered a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea on Cunningham’s behalf, leading to an evaluation that found Cunningham not competent to stand trial. Hospital personnel have a year to “restore” Cunningham to competency so he can stand trial.

Hively said it’s frustrating to see Cunningham in a mental health facility instead of facing punishment because she thinks Cunningham is using possible mental health issues to escape punishment. She says it appears he escaped serious consequences for a 2015 conviction in Stark County Common Pleas Court on sexual battery and gross sexual imposition involving a child.

Cunningham was classified as a Tier II sex offender as a result of the 2015 convictions and was required to register his address twice a year in the county where he lived for 25 years.

Stark County Common Pleas Court records show that Cunningham was evaluated for competency to stand trial in that case also, but was found competent and was sentenced in November 2015 to three years in prison. By the following month, however, he had been released from custody and was placed in the county’s H.O.P.E. program, which stands for Helping Offenders Psychologically and Emotionally.

It is designed for individuals with common pleas court cases who “have a history of mental health issues,” according to the court’s website.

PROTECTION ORDER

Hively said that her daughter, her sister and her mother obtained civil stalking protection orders against Cunningham on March 31, 2023, after Cunningham made threats toward the family. However, the protection order didn’t protect her sister from being killed.

Hively said her family approached the Smith Township Police Department in late February 2023 to tell them about Cunningham’s threats, hoping new criminal charges might stop his behaviors. But no charge was ever filed.

“We thought they were going to put him in jail,” Hively said.

According to a 16-page Smith Township Police Department report, Gena Wade reported her concerns Feb. 24, 2023, and stated that Cunningham was “considered a friend of the family,” but he had made threatening phone calls about Hively’s 12-year-old daughter.

The family previously allowed Cunningham to visit the girl because Cunningham “had the mentality of a child,” the report states. The police department looked up Cunningham’s Facebook page, and it contained a photo of the girl on the cover page.

According to the report, Gena Wade also told police that Cunningham had told her and Hively that when the girl turned 18, he was “going to marry her.” Smith Township Police detective Ryan Smith investigated the matter four days after Gena Ward made her report. He talked to Carol Wade, Gena’s mother, who said the issues involving Cunningham and the girl started about two years earlier but “started to get progressively worse,” the report states.

Smith contacted a detective with the Stark County Sheriff’s Office on March 1, 2023, and learned that Cunningham, who lived in Stark County, was a Tier II sex offender who was required to register his address in Stark County two times per year. The detective said he would investigate the allegations against Cunningham.

The detective later told Smith, on March 2, 2023, he could not file a complaint against Cunningham for having an “unregistered social media account,” and it would be up to the prosecutor to decide what to do. In a later conversation with another officer with the Stark County Sheriff’s Office, Smith was told the sheriff’s office’s sex offender unit has had “no luck” in filing complaints against registered sex offenders regarding their social media accounts, Smith’s report states.

Smith called Katie Jones that same day. Jones, a Mahoning County assistant prosecutor working in the Sebring area at the time, looked at Cunningham’s Facebook page and agreed “something needed to be done,” according to the police report.

Jones suggested a misdemeanor menacing by stalking or another menacing type of misdemeanor charge. However, Smith then had trouble getting statements from various family members and obtaining copies of the messages they had received from Cunningham, the report states.

By March 6, Smith stated in a report that family members were “not cooperating with us and are refusing to fill out victim statement forms.” They also would not let Smith talk to the child. On March 9, 2023, Jack Ausnehmer, county assistant prosecutor in the Sebring area, advised Smith to “drop the investigation because we did not have enough to charge anyone.”

When Hively was shown the police reports indicating that the family was not cooperating with the investigation, she said she doesn’t know whether she and her sister did those things or not. The names of the people the detective talked to are blacked out in the reports. As far as not allowing police to talk to her daughter, Hively said, “If I didn’t do anything, it was for the sake of my daughter. But I had no idea they were going to make it look like I didn’t take it seriously. I did.”

HISTORY

Hively and her fiance, Richard Hashman, said Hively and her sister had known Cunningham for many years because both women provided care to Cunningham’s mother, Kathy Cunningham, for about 20 years.

“We felt bad for Nicholas. We gave him rides to the gas station,” Hively said.

Hashman said Nicholas Cunningham “didn’t have many friends, so (the sisters) tried to look out for him a little bit.”

But that all changed in late 2022 when Hively and her family learned that Cunningham had been convicted of a sex offense involving a child in 2015 and had been classified a sex offender.

Cunningham had been sending Facebook messages to Hively’s 12-year-old daughter, but that stopped after they found out about his criminal history.

“So we said this has got to stop. It’s not going to happen any more,” Hashman said.

Hively said Gena found out that Cunningham was posting “inappropriate” things about Hively’s daughter on Facebook, so they “told him stay away,” Hively said.

Cunningham’s behavior got worse after that, Hashman said. “Once we stopped that communication, he started sending death threats to the whole family. We took the death threats seriously, and we took the messages he had been sending through Facebook and Messenger on their telephones to the Smith Township Police Department and showed them what was going on,” he said.

The police department advised the family that they thought they could file a criminal charge against Cunningham to stop the threats, but no charges were filed, Hively and Hashman said.

In about February 2023, before the protection order was granted, Cunningham drove a car onto Courtney Road and got stuck in a ditch, Carol Wade said. The next day, a family member got a text message from Cunningham. It said, “I came to deliver mail, but I overshot your drive and got stuck in the neighbor’s ditch and I had to get towed,” she said. “I’ll have to bring it some other time.”

She said she told Gena about it, and Gena said “When he starts coming out here, we need to do something about it because he never came out here,” Carol said.

Hively provided The Vindicator with a Facebook message Cunningham wrote Feb. 13, 2023, that shows how upset Cunningham was when the family unfriended him on Facebook and would not allow him to see the 12-year-old girl.

“When I do come for revenge unexpectedly you won’t see me coming,” he wrote. “Don’t underestimate what I will and will not do, especially that you guys took everything from me. Makes it to where it’ll be easier for me to do what I have to do.

“To make you all feel the way I do the pain and suffering of my friend being done for no reason. Except selfishness (sic) people that made my friend turn against me. I promise I’ll make sure you all feel the pain you caused me.”

Carol said the Facebook messages the Smith Township Police Department found indicated Cunningham had a “crush” on the girl.

In Gena Wade’s request for a protection order, she wrote that Cunningham was “targeting my 12-year-old niece, and he is a convicted sex offender.” Gena Wade alleged Cunningham had threatened her and her mother “almost every day” on his Facebook page, according to the protection order application.

Hashman also said that the Smith Township Police Department told the family that two weeks prior to the homicide, Cunningham went to an area sporting goods store trying to buy a firearm. He was denied because he did not pass the background check, Hashman said.

Hashman said he thinks it could be a crime for a felon to try to buy a firearm, but Hashman said he thinks no criminal charge was filed against Cunningham related to that.

POLICE CHIEF

When Smith Township Police Chief Paul Ceresna was asked about the issues Hively and Hashman raised, he declined to be interviewed because the criminal case against Cunningham is still pending, he said.

But he did offer his opinion in an email on protection orders.

“Protection orders are essential in helping victims during an incident,” he stated. “It’s an early, much-needed deterrent for any victim.”

He said protection orders cannot provide “guaranteed protection. They are essentially made to deter suspects from having any contact with a victim or a victim’s relatives. In the event of a violation, suspects are required to sit in jail until they can see a judge, and they help to increase penalties if a suspect is arrested for a violation.”

He said it is “vital to have a good support system in place, from the victim being aware of their situation in their daily lives, possibly letting neighbors and family know and help keep an eye out for anything suspicious in the area, and just being vigilant.”

He said that in the Gena Wade case, “it unfortunately was not enough of a deterrent to stop the suspect.”

MAHONING PROSECUTOR

Gina DeGenova, Mahoning County prosecutor, was asked why Ausnehmer advised the Smith Township Police Department to drop its investigation into Cunningham’s threatening behavior in March 2023.

She stated in an email that in talking with Smith, one factor was that Cunningham was living in Stark County. “Officer Smith notified Stark County officials of potential violations stemming from Cunningham’s status as a registered sex offender, but charges were declined. I am not privy to who made this decision or their rationale.

“An investigation was conducted on Cunningham’s Facebook posts and any potential charges stemming therefrom. Unfortunately, due to a lack of cooperation from the parties involved, there was insufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges at that time.”

Have an interesting story? Contact Ed Runyan by email at erunyan@vindy.com. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @TribToday.