YOUNGSTOWN — Shalako R. Pierce, 32, of Fitzgerald Avenue in Austintown, pleaded guilty to felonious assault earlier this week in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court and was sentenced to 3 to 4 1/2 years in prison.

Pierce was scheduled for trial Tuesday on the second-degree felony, but his guilty plea avoided a trial before Judge Anthony Donofrio. Pierce was secretly indicted in November 2023. Pierce’s sentence will run at the same time as three 2023 criminal cases out of Portage County, according to court documents.

The charge resulted from a 2:46 a.m. fight Oct. 21, 2023, at Chippers Sports Bar and Grill on North Edgehill and Mahoning avenues in Austintown in which two people were injured and took themselves to the Mercy Health Austintown emergency room for treatment, according to an Austintown police report.

It states that the fight occurred in the bar near the pool tables. A man told police he was part of a group of people playing pool when a man wearing a yellow sweater approached his group and called them obscenities. The man said “the next thing he knew, he was on top of somebody holding them back.” The man’s wife was bleeding afterwards, the report states.

The man said the people he was with were “jumped by an unknown group of people.” The suspects left in three vehicles, the report states. The man gave police the license plate information for two of the vehicles.

The report states that two victims were “both clearly injured and bleeding.” One woman had an “open wound on her forehead above her right eye,” the report states. A man had an open wound above his right eyebrow. Austintown firefighters assessed the injuries.

A second man, who was with the other man interviewed by police, told police that he and the other man were near the pool tables when a man in a neon green shirt approached and used obscenities toward them. The man said he confronted the other man and was punched in the back of the head. He wrestled the other man to the floor. While he was on the floor he was “stomped” in the face, he said.

A woman said she was with the two other men who spoke to police, and a man in a yellow-hooded sweatshirt called her and the two men she was with obscene names.

She said she confronted the man and was soon confronted by a woman, whom she named. She said the woman hit her in the face with an object, and she also was hit by another woman and thrown to the ground and kicked in the face.

Another officer made a traffic stop on a Chevrolet Tahoe leaving Chippers that was pointed out by a man, who said that was the group involved in the assault.

The officer spoke with an injured woman from the Tahoe who said she was involved in a fight with another woman. She said the altercation began because a woman approached her friend, Nicholas Bortmas, “in an aggressive manner.” She said she stepped between Bortmas and the woman, at which time some pushing took place and a woman was punched in the side of the face. The police report contains blacked out sections as required under Marsy’s Law, which protects the identity of crime victims but makes it difficult to tell who is being described in the report.

Bortmas, 33, of Canfield-Niles Road in Austintown, who was also charged in the disturbance, was among the people in the Tahoe, the report states. Bortmas was observed wearing a yellow-hooded sweatshirt when the officer made the traffic stop, the report states.

Bortmas pleaded guilty to a low-level felony of inducing panic in the case in December, and Donofrio sentenced Bortmas two years of probation.

Pierce also was in the Tahoe.