Staff photo / Ed Runyan Mickele Glenn, right, listens as his attorneys discuss Glenn’s murder case Wednesday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. From left are attorneys Walter Ritchie and Aaron Meikle.

YOUNGSTOWN — A woman whose testimony is apparently the key to the prosecution’s case against Mickele Glenn in a 2023 Youngstown murder case testified in a Mahoning County jail outfit Wednesday.

The woman was brought to the courtroom of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony D’Apolito by deputies and testified for nearly two hours.

She was in a jail jumpsuit because D’Apolito ordered her held in the Mahoning County jail Nov. 17 after she unexpectedly showed up at the county courthouse that morning on a day Glenn was scheduled for trial.

D’Apolito ordered her held in jail on a material witness warrant so that she would be available to testify this week. Earlier efforts to locate her failed in the lead-up to earlier trial dates, including attempts to locate her by the U.S. Marshals Service.

Mahoning County Assistant Prosecutor Melissa Dinsio asked her during her testimony why she was in an orange jail uniform, and she said it was because she was scared to testify. She said she remains scared that someone might “try to harm me,” including Glenn.

Earlier in her testimony, she recounted the details of Halloween, Oct. 31, 2023, when her “best friend,” Edward Lewis, 53, was shot to death inside his home on Oneta Street on the West Side.

She testified that everything she heard and saw that evening pointed to Glenn, who she was in a romantic relationship with at the time, having killed Lewis. But she held onto hope that her intuitions were wrong. Lewis was found dead in his home two days later.

She testified that she and Glenn took her kids and others trick or treating in Struthers. She got intoxicated, and then she told Glenn to take her to Lewis’ house. They arrived about 6:15 p.m., and she saw Lewis sitting in a lawn chair in the front yard.

Glenn asked Lewis if he could use his bathroom, and Lewis said he could. The two men walked into the house together.

The woman was sitting in the car and heard noises like fireworks, she said. When asked if the noises could have been gunshots, she said yes. There were about five of them, and they were coming from the area of the house, she said.

She got out of the car and walked toward the house, meeting Glenn coming back out, she said. “He grabbed me by the collar and just put me in the car,” she said.

When she was asked why she didn’t call the police, she said she was scared. She tried to call and text Lewis the next morning to dispel her fears that he was dead, but she got no response. He also did not show up the next day to help with her daughter like he usually did, she said.

A couple of days later, she learned that Youngstown police detectives had come to her house and wanted to speak to her, she testified. She called the detectives the next morning.

When Detective George Anderson came to her home the next day, she knew Lewis was dead, she said. She did not tell Anderson what she saw and heard on Halloween. She said the reason she didn’t tell him was that she was “scared.” She said Glenn had a gun at that time, but he told her a day or so later he sold it.

She testified that in March of 2025, Anderson came to her home and took her to the Youngstown police station. She still did not tell Anderson that she was in a car outside of Lewis’ house and heard firecrackers / gunshots Oct. 31, 2023, she said.

But when she got home, Glenn was acting “weird,” as if he thought she had told police something, the witness said. She read text messages that she and Glenn exchanged after the March conversation with the detective. It was difficult to hear much of what she said because the witness spoke softly, but Dinsio repeated some of what she said in followup questions.

“He says that you shouldn’t be bringing this (deleted) back up,” Dinsio said. “Had you brought it up before?”

“Yea,” the witness said of the issue of Lewis’ murder. “Ever since the detective came to the house that day, I was bringing it up,” she said.

“Why did you keep bringing it up,” Dinsio asked.

“Because I was scared,” she replied.

Then Dinsio handed the woman a printed Facebook post from a man who had been in communication with Glenn that urges women “to learn to mind y’all own business” and suggesting that “smoking” such women and their kids might be necessary. She read the messages, and they made her “bothered and worried and fearful for my life,” the witness said.

The next day, she called Anderson’s phone and left a message for him to call her. He picked her up and took her to the police station. And this time she told him what happened at Lewis’ house Oct. 31, 2023, she said.

Anderson was on the witness stand later in the day, but his testimony was not finished at the end of the day. His testimony resumes at 9 a.m. today. He is expected to be the last witness of the trial, followed by closing arguments and jury deliberations today.