YOUNGSTOWN — Robert G. Ribarin, 40, of North Brockway Avenue, was sentenced to 30 months in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty earlier in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to attempted felonious assault for driving a vehicle at a man near the victim’s home on Wesley Avenue on the West Side April 29. The victim was not hit or injured.

A Youngstown police report states that Ribarin drove a car with a female passenger to her home on Wesley Avenue from his home on North Brockway. She was trying to get there as quickly as possible to pick up her children because she saw her ex-boyfriend driving near the Brockway home and suspected he had left their children home alone.

The ex-boyfriend called 911 and said someone in a blue Ford Escape had tried to run him over. The victim said the driver also struck another vehicle in the parking lot of a nearby Mahoning Avenue store before fleeing toward downtown.

An officer located the Escape sideways on Rhoda Avenue near Mahoning Avenue and spoke with Ribarin there. Ribarin was later taken to the Mahoning County jail and was charged in the episode after police investigated and observed tire tracks in the yard on Wesley, according to the police report.

The ex-boyfriend told police that when he got back to Wesley Avenue, he saw the blue Escape in the neighbor’s driveway. The vehicle went through the yard toward him in his driveway and tried to hit him, he told police. He said he did not know at the time who was driving it.

Ribarin and Cartwright-Jones told Judge Maureen Sweeney on Tuesday that the act of driving toward the woman’s ex-boyfriend was done as a “diversion” to assist the woman he was with. Ribarin told police the woman got out of the car and went into the house to retrieve the children.

Prosecutors had recommended that Ribarin get an unspecified amount of incarceration.

Rhys Cartwright-Jones, Ribarin’s attorney, told the judge that the time 142 days Ribarin has spent in the Mahoning County jail awaiting trial has had a positive effect on Ribarin: He got a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and has been treated for the issue.

Cartwright-Jones mentioned that Ribarin has dealt with mental health issues for 24 years and has a serious history of substance abuse and a “serious history of personal child abuse.”

Cartwright Jones said “finally Mr. Ribarin’s getting treatment for a mental illness that has been looming behind his childhood and adult life and maybe some of the criminal history we have seen.”

Cartwright-Jones asked Sweeney to allow Ribarin to be released with just the amount of time Ribarin had served in the county jail, but the judge did not agree.