YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County Prosecutor Lynn Maro asked Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Maureen Sweeney to sentence Damian Cessna, 28, to one year in prison with credit for almost a year already served in the county jail for his felonious assault against a Boardman police officer, but Sweeney gave Cessna four to six years in prison.

Cessna was convicted at trial in May for charging at Boardman police officer Evan Beil while holding a knife early July 13, 2021, which resulted in Beil shooting Cessna until Cessna dropped to the ground. Beil was not injured.

Beil said he made a traffic stop on Cessna about 12:30 a.m. at South Avenue and Mathews Road in Boardman because Cessna was riding a bicycle at night while holding a baseball bat and riding in the wrong lane of travel. Beil said he told Cessna to pull the knife out of its sheath and throw it away, but Cessna instead charged at Beil with the knife pointed at the officer.

Maro said the presentence investigation into Cessna’s criminal history and background indicated that Cessna is a low risk to reoffend, and prosecutors had offered Cessna a recommendation of one year in prison if he would have entered a guilty plea prior to trial.

Maro said she thinks that since prosecutors thought one year in prison was a just sentence when it was offered to Cessna in plea negotiations, then it should still be a just sentence now and “not change just because Mr. Cessna went to trial.”

Maro has been Mahoning County’s elected prosecutor since early January. She was a longtime defense attorney before that.

Maro said the “record is replete” with references to Cessna’s “detailed mental-health history,” which is why her office asked Sweeney recently for a new mental-health assessment just before the sentencing hearing. The assessment was done.

“Mr. Cessna has multiple diagnoses,” Maro said.

An image that stands out for her is a photo of a box of prescription bottles in Cessna’s Boardman home in which the “pills were still in the bottles,” Maro said.

She urged Sweeney to give Cessna a sentence that included “some type of intensive supervision of Mr. Cessna to make sure he is complying with medication and getting the mental health treatment he needs.”

Maro said that in the South Avenue incident, Beil “believed he was in harm’s way. Mr. Cessna’s conduct was not appropriate. (Cessna) did drop the baseball bat, but he pulled a knife and did not comply with officer Beil’s directives. Fortunately, officer Beil was not harmed.”

She said those facts resulted in Cessna being convicted of a first-degree felony that does not require prison time.

Maro noted that Cessna “showed remorse and kept apologizing for what he did” to ambulance personnel after the incident. Maro said she thinks Cessna’s mental health issues prevented him from having the “ability to review the plea offer that was made to him and accept it. He does not have the ability to make those assessments in that moment.”

Sweeney interjected with an observation during Maro’s remarks, saying that in the recently completed mental-health assessment, Cessna “denied ever committing the crime, which says to the court that he denied accepting responsibility.”

Maro responded that Cessna is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and paranoid personality disorder, and “all of those lead to his inability to understand today what he understood then, when he did take responsibility. That erratic behavior is very characteristic of those mental-health problems.”

Maro said her concern is that Cessna could end up back on the street after his sentence is complete with no mental health treatment and no “safety net to ensure compliance. We need intensive supervision. We don’t have any mental health facilities to sentence him to. I wish we did.”

Beil made remarks before sentencing. He did not ask for any specific sentence for Cessna. He said the day of the incident, Cessna “armed himself with his favorite knife, armed himself with a baseball bat, armed himself with his gloves with the steel knuckles, armed himself with two additional knives.”

He said Cessna was on his way “to his friend’s house, a romantic rival, to confront him about stealing his girlfriend.” Beil did not know any of that at the time, he noted. He only intended to warn Cessna that riding a bike at night with no lights on it, on the wrong side of the road, was dangerous.

“I didn’t want him to be another statistic, another traffic fatality,” Beil said.

Cessna “falsely claimed he was on his way home and that I was messing with him,” Beil said. “I interrupted Mr. Cessna’s mission that night, and it immediately escalated to an act of violence, not an act of violence by me, an act of violence by Mr. Cessna.”

Beil said he is getting married in September, and he and his fiancee are planning to start a family. He said every day he is reminded of the Cessna incident and “how close it came to me not being able to experience these things.”

Beil said he understands that Cessna has mental-health issues, but the evidence indicates that Cessna “has been noncompliant with his medication, his mental-health treatment.” Beil said he thinks that if Cessna gets no prison time, he will “fail to realize the seriousness of his actions, fail to see the consequences of his actions.”

Cessna, who stood with his head down throughout the hearing, did not offer any remarks when it was his turn to speak.