Staff photo / Ed Runyan Lynn Maro hugs a supporter after the results came back indicating she was the winner of the race for Mahoning County prosecutor on Tuesday night.

YOUNGSTOWN — Gina DeGenova on Tuesday narrowly lost her first election to remain Mahoning County prosecutor as late results swung the race in favor of Republican challenger Lynn Maro by about 800 votes.

DeGenova was leading 53% to 47% with 80% of the precincts counted, but final results showed both with 50% of the vote. DeGenova had 52,830 votes and Maro had 53,645, according to incomplete and unofficial results from the Mahoning County Board of Elections.

DeGenova finished out the final two years of the final term in office of her boss, Paul Gains.

Gains served as Mahoning County prosecutor 26 years, starting just after a hitman working for the mob tried to kill Gains on Christmas Eve 1996. He retired as county prosecutor in late 2022.

DeGenova, 50, of Canfield, was part of a large election watch party at Double Bogey’s Bar and Grill in Boardman Tuesday night, where DeGenova took a solid lead with the early voting results.

She said this campaign has “been an amazing experience for me to talk to the members of the public and just be there for them. I love the job.”

Maro, 57, of Poland, also had sought to be appointed to fill the last two years of Gains’ final term, but that appointment went to DeGenova, who worked for Gains for 17 years, mostly in the civil division of the prosecutor’s office.

After decades as a self-employed defense attorney in Mahoning County, Maro had a stockpile of complaints about how Gains ran the prosecutor’s office — from not turning over evidence to the defense in a timely manner, to letting people charged with murder plead down to manslaughter. She has been a defense attorney for 23 years.

When Maro was asked Tuesday night at Cassese’s MVR in Youngstown what voters told her during the campaign, she said voters mostly want one thing: “They want to be safe. They want to be in their homes with their families and get jobs. It didn’t matter if they were Democrats, Libertarians, independents or Republicans. The comments, the concerns are the same. It didn’t matter if I was knocking on doors in Canfield or Austintown, everybody has the same concerns and wants the same thing.”

During the campaign, Maro said her research showed that the prosecutor’s office was letting too many murder cases be dismissed or found not guilty.

“Fifteen percent of (Mahoning County) murder cases in the past four years have been dismissed or not guilty,” Maro previously said, adding that the number is zero in Trumbull County. Trumbull officials confirmed that during the last two years at least, the rate is zero.

Maro has been a defense attorney on 50 murder cases in her career, including in the murder of 4-year-old Rowan Sweeney in 2020. She and another attorney represented defendant Kimonie Bryant in the Rowan case, and Bryant eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and was sentenced in July to 20 years to life in prison.

When asked about Maro’s complaints about the number of murder cases pleaded down, DeGenova said Maro “discounts the fact that convictions for manslaughter are still exactly that, convictions. They represent closure for victims’ families and prison sentences. These defendants did not simply walk out the door back into society.” She said amendments from murder to manslaughter “happen all over Ohio and are not unique to Mahoning County.”

DeGenova provided statistics showing that of 16 homicide cases that were resolved since she became prosecutor in 2023, half (8 of 16) were reduced from murder to involuntary manslaughter.

“What Ms. Maro is saying is we should never resolve cases (through a plea), and we should go to trial on every case. Justice would stop at its nose. There are a lot of factors that go into it. Are there resolutions in some cases? Of course. But these are convictions with large sentences.”

Maro also criticized murder cases in which the prosecutor’s office turned over evidence late to the defense, including a case in which Maro defense attorney. In that case, Judge John Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court called it “inexcusable.”

At the time, DeGenova said the prosecutor’s office was imposing a new policy “where we check the files 30 days out (from trial), and we make sure these requests are compiled with.”

After Gains promoted DeGenova to chief assistant prosecutor in January 2021 and during her 21 months as prosecutor, she has increased the public’s knowledge of the workings of the prosecutor’s office.

She and her staff have provided the public with classes on how to stay safe and provided annual reports and other information about the office on its enhanced Facebook page, she said.

She has “nearly quadrupled the programming we have,” DeGenova told The Vindicator. She has spoken to 55 groups on scams and frauds, juvenile law and bullying. And she started a special victims unit to focus more attention on vulnerable victims.