YOUNGSTOWN — Despite whatever complications arose last year preventing the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office from obtaining a file needed to research the March 24, 2003, drive-by murder of 3-month-old Jiyen Dent Jr. in Youngstown, finding the file about 10 days ago was no big deal, said Mahoning County Chief Deputy Clerk Kathy Rudzik.

The file prosecutors needed was for capital murder defendant John E. Drummond Jr., 48, who was convicted in the shooting death of the baby but is now raising new issues in his case, primarily whether he should get a new trial because of claims that a witness is now recanting his trial testimony.

Rudzik, an attorney, said she took over as chief deputy clerk Oct. 20, 2025. Clerk of Courts Michael Ciccone fired his then-chief deputy clerk, Jennifer Ciccone, Oct. 17. Michael Ciccone took over as clerk of courts in early January 2025 after winning the November 2024 general election.

His first year in office was full of controversy, including remarks Jennifer Ciccone, no relation, made about Michael Ciccone on social media after her termination, and Michael Ciccone’s wife, Emily, filing for divorce against Michael Ciccone Oct. 7. Emily Ciccone requested and received dismissal of the divorce case Oct. 22.

In December, the heads of the Mahoning County Republican and Democratic parties announced they were launching an effort to gather petitions to remove Michael Ciccone from office. Officials have said the process could take between four and nine months.

As for the Drummond file, the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s office has filed several requests with Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Donofrio, asking for extensions of time to respond to the motion asking for a new trial.

In November, Mahoning County Prosecutor Lynn Maro and assistant prosecutors John Juhasz and Kristie Weibling requested another 60 days to respond — their third request for more time.

They stated something unexpected — that one of the reasons for the delay was that the “file” in the Drummond case was “largely missing from the County Prosecutor’s Office.” Maro took over in January 2025 as prosecutor.

“Under what circumstances someone would discard a capital case file, the undersigned simply cannot conceive,” Maro, Juhasz and Weibling stated.

Two Democrats — Paul Gains and then Gina DeGenova — were the county prosecutor in the decades before Maro, a Republican, took office as county prosecutor.

The Maro-Juhasz-Weibling filing suggested that the prosecutor’s office was gathering up documents it could use to piece together the facts in the Drummond case, such as a trial transcript from the clerk of courts office and one from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

The filing also cited several other reasons why it was going to be difficult to prepare the response in the decades-old case — the trial transcript being voluminous, the lead prosecutor in the case being deceased and Maro and Juhasz both being new to the prosecutor’s office.

On Jan. 16, Maro, Juhasz and Weibling filed another motion asking for 60 more days to file their response in the Drummond case. This time, something else surprising had happened — the case file from the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office was found — two days earlier — in the possession of the Mahoning County Clerk of Courts Office.

Maro and Juhasz did not say where it was found, but they said they learned that on March 5, 2004, the “Mahoning County Clerk of Court accepted for filing under seal the complete file maintained by the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office for this matter.”

The filing noted that “despite extensive and diligent efforts, they (had) been unsuccessful in locating an internal copy of the complete case file” and the prosecutor’s office “has engaged in ongoing discussions with the (Clerk of Courts) in an effort to locate the sealed file. Despite these ongoing discussions, the sealed file was not located by the Clerk until Jan. 14, 2026.”

Now that this file has been located, the prosecutor’s office can “complete a comprehensive review of this file in order to adequately and intelligently respond to the pending motion,” the new filing states. It asks for a new deadline of March 19, 2026. Donofrio had not responded to the requested new deadline as of Thursday. The attorneys seeking the new trial made their request July 17.

When Rudzik was asked why the prosecutor’s office had had such difficulty obtaining the file they needed, she said she did not know, emphasizing that she was not working for the Clerk of Courts Office during the summer when officials first started looking for it.

Rudzik said she has come to understand that the file was in a locked filing cabinet and that death-penalty files like the one in the Drummond case are kept in locked areas controlled by the Clerk of Courts Office.

She said when she was asked earlier this month if she would look for the file, she and another employee looked for it and found it quickly. She said she was told that Kathi McNabb Welsh, who was chief deputy clerk under former Clerk of Courts Anthony Vivo, “had an idea where it might be, and I guess, I don’t want to speculate on it. We found it.”

She said, “Since I wasn’t involved in it during the summer, I didn’t realize that was a deal worth talking to you (a reporter) about.” She said, “The topic hasn’t come up since I’ve been employed until the prosecutor’s office called” the most recent time.

Rudzik said she does not know for sure, “But I guess in death penalty cases, the prosecutor file is sometimes held by us under seal, and that was the case in this one. I guess they couldn’t find it in the summer.”

Rudzik said the clerk of courts office has one area where death-penalty case files are kept and another locked area for other items that are kept under seal. She said she thinks someone looked in the first area for the file last summer, but it ended up being in the other area. But she said she would refer questions about that to the prosecutors’ office.

Rudzik was asked whether she thinks the turmoil within the clerk of courts office and the reputation Michael Ciccone and Jennifer Ciccone have had for ignoring requests from the news media for information about the operation of the office could have hampered cooperation between the Clerk of Courts Office and others. She said she doesn’t think it should now that she is there.

“As soon as (the prosecutor’s office) called, me and another supervisor here started looking,” Rudzik said of the Drummond file. It was found quickly after they were directed where to find it, she said. “They called in the afternoon. We went and looked for it, found it and called them,” Rudzik said.

PROSECUTOR’S INPUT

When Maro was asked Friday about the problems finding the file, she said when her office first started asking the clerk of courts office for files related to the Drummond case, “There were repeated requests for the file, and we kept hearing ‘There was nothing. There was nothing.'”

She said the prosecutor’s office was told there were files in the basement, so “We went and looked at that, and it appeared to be just the transcript and some of the court filings. There was no prosecutor file, nothing else. We did what we could.”

She said earlier this month, she and others in the prosecutor’s office were trying to prepare a response to the Drummond request for a new trial when Maro mentioned the missing at a staff meeting.

Maro said, “I can’t believe the prior administration here in the prosecutor’s office didn’t keep a death penalty file. Because we looked everywhere for it.’ And that’s when Kathi Welsh said, ‘It’s in the Clerk of Court’s office, in Michael Ciccone’s office in a … filing cabinet. And she said that is where all sealed criminal case files were kept.'”

McNabb Welsh said, “Let’s call over there now.” McNabb Welsh called Rudzik and told her about the filing cabinet. At first, Rudzik said the filing cabinet McNabb Welsh was talking about contained only files related to the Oak Hill Renaissance prosecution from a decade ago and that those files had been “cleaned out.”

But McNabb Welsh told her there were other files in there — other cases for which the files had been sealed. “Twenty minutes later, maybe 40 minutes later, they called and said, ‘Yep, it was right there. We have it,'” Maro said.

The Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office does not yet have the file. Juhasz is finishing a filing asking Donofrio to release the file to the prosecutor’s office, he said.

When Maro was asked about the relationship between the clerk of courts office and the prosecutor’s office, she said she has known Rudzik for years. “She’s been very responsive when we call with concerns,” Maro said. Rudzik was not there during the summer when the issue of the missing file was first addressed, Maro said.

Maro noted, “When you have two major offices (Prosecutor and Clerk of Courts) that have significant changes in administration, you are going to have issues.” Juhasz said Rudzik regularly sends him information he needs, and he sends her a weekly notice of lawyers handling new criminal cases, and, “The communications are fine.”

When Maro was asked about the length of time it took for McNabb Welsh to provide the information that helped locate the file, Maro said NcNabb Welsh is head of Maro’s civil division, so Maro did not want to burden her with issues related to her former job at the Clerk of Courts office.

Maro said, in hindsight, “Maybe I could have gone to (McNabb Welsh) and said, ‘Do you have any idea where this might be?’ But when they found the partial file in the basement, I thought that was all they had left.”