Staff photo / Ed Runyan Quentell Elhakim, 30, of West Middlesex, Pa., showed his relief and gratitude to defense attorney Tom Zena, left, after Elhakim was found not guilty Thursday on all three counts of rape he faced in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.

YOUNGSTOWN — Quentell Elhakim, 30, of West Middlesex, Pa.,was found not guilty on all three rape counts Thursday afternoon in a case that was a bit unusual in that it involved an adult rather than a child.

Perhaps also unusual was the scenario that the woman described during her testimony — that on the night of Jan. 8, 2023, when Elhakim went to her Youngstown home to meet her in person, she became uncomfortable with his advances but did not scream or fight back, saying she was intimidated by his size and fearful he would hurt or kill her and her son.

The trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court lasted four days with testimony from the woman and from Elhakim, as well as other witnesses.

Elhakim and the woman said they met on a dating app a couple days before Elhakim went to her home to meet her the first time. He said the sex was consensual. The woman said she became concerned because he was not respecting her “boundaries,” but was afraid to fight back.

When asked to comment after the verdict, defense attorney Tony Meranto said he thought an important factor in the jury’s decision was what he thought was a skewed perception by the woman as a result of drinking wine and taking several puffs of marijuana.

Meranto reiterated something he raised during his cross examination of the woman — that marijuana can cause paranoia.

Defense attorney Tom Zena said he does not think anyone thought the woman was lying. “She’s thinking one way; he’s thinking another way,” he said of Elhakim. Meranto noted there were “no signs of violence” when Youngstown police arrived mere minutes after the sex ended. There were no bruises or marks, he said.

The woman testified that she became nervous about Elhakim and fearful after he started to touch her. She said she did not act more forcefully to stop him out of fear. Her young son was asleep in his bedroom. No one else was home.

The woman had texted a friend who lives out of state about her fears about Elhakim but did not immediately want her friend to contact Youngstown police, she said. She did give her friend the go-ahead in a text to call Youngstown police later, leading to officers arriving just after Elhakim washed up after the encounter.

During Meranto’s cross examination of the woman, he asked whether Elhakim was “in any way physically threatening to you” at the point she described Elhakim being irritated with her for spending so much time cleaning up a wine spill on the couch.

She said he was not “threatening me. He intimidated me.”

Meranto asked “You’re intimidated in your mind, correct?”

“No. Not in my mind,” she said.

“Well, what did he do to intimidate you at that point?”

She said Elhakim was “touching on me and getting closer to me and he proceeded to tell me he didn’t mean to make me feel uncomfortable as he was continuing to touch me and rub me and feeling me,” she said.

Meranto said after the verdict that the law says to prove Elhakim used force to have sex with the woman, “it does not need to be physical force if he overcomes the force of her will.” Meranto said, “Obviously the jury didn’t think” Elhakim did that.

Zena noted that this case was different from many because the woman was a registered nurse, and the man was an 8- or 9-year Navy veteran who “has a new job and has never even had a traffic ticket.”

ASSISTANT PROSECUTOR

When Assistant Mahoning County Prosecutor Caitlyn Andrews, who was part of the prosecution team, was asked about the verdict, she said, “I think (beyond a) reasonable doubt is a hard standard (to meet).”

She said in rape cases that involve two adults, “you are not getting a lot of supporting evidence. So you have to go off of the word of the victim. In this case, there was some corroborating evidence.” Andrews was referring to text messages to the woman’s friend.

Andrews said that even with text messages showing the woman expressing her concerns about Elhakim, the jury “did not feel confident in his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

When Andrews was asked whether the law required the woman to forcefully tell the man she did not want to have sex or to tell him to leave, she said, “She did make a statement right before the sexual assault saying, ‘That’s not what we are going to do tonight.’ So from our point of view, we thought she made it very clear to him that she was not consenting to any type of sexual activity.”

Andrews said she talked with the prospective jurors during jury selection about how “everyone reacts differently when they are in fear and experiencing trauma.” Andrews said the woman in this case “reacted by freezing. And I think some people have a hard time with that. It’s our position that she was clear that she was not consenting.”

When asked how common it is to prosecute adult rapes compared to rapes of juveniles, Andrews said she has only prosecuted one other defendant in an adult rape case. That person, Franklin Herns, was convicted of two counts of rape in 2022 for sexually assaulting a woman he had dated in the past. He was again convicted of rape in 2023 under similar circumstances.

“It’s difficult when it’s adults because it’s a ‘he said, she said,'” Andrews said. “Some people have a difficult time with adult rape cases … because they are a lot more difficult to prove.”

RECENT OUTCOMES

When Mahoning County Prosecutor Lynn Maro was asked if she is concerned that there have been a larger number of not-guilty verdicts in recent trials, she said one thing to keep in mind is that the two mistrials in the past week “are not dismissals or no-guilties. Those are being retried.”

She said someone said to her earlier Thursday, “Wow, two dismissals, and I said ‘No, mistrials are not dismissals.'”

Maro said she did a quick look Thursday afternoon at the criminal trials held in Mahoning County since she took office in January 2025 and found that the percentage of guilty verdicts is “about 70%.” She said there could have been a case that hasn’t gone into the database yet to throw that number off.

She said a 30% not-guilty rate “is not a real high number.” She said when she took training for a new prosecutor in January 2025, a man who had been a county prosecutor since 1996 said, “If you are not losing cases, you are not doing your job.”

He said there should be multiple losses per year “because you should be trying the tough cases. We’re trying more tough cases than ever before,” she said.

An example is a mother who was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter but guilty of a lesser offense of child endangering in the death of her son after he got into fentanyl at home and died.

“The jury basically said she’s been punished enough already,” Maro said. An overall 70% conviction rate is “pretty good,” she said.

Before she became county prosecutor in January 2025, defendants charged with murder were getting a life prison sentence 24% of the time, she said. “We’re at 60% now.”

Maro said she expects the 70% conviction rate to “increase as we finish up some of the old cases that were indicted before I took office and before changes were made in grand-jury-presentment and prosecution procedures.

“Is there room for improvement, sure. But are we trending in the right direction, I think so,” Maro said.

Recent not-guilty verdicts in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court include Robyn Johnson, 29, of Boardman being found not guilty at trial Feb. 11 of discharging a firearm on or near prohibited premises and two counts of felonious assault for allegedly firing a gun into a car containing a victim and a man, hitting the woman in the shoulder. Johnson argued that she acted in self defense.

On Jan. 19, a jury found Kenneth L. Carter, 35, and Terry Hopkins, 23, not guilty on murder and a gun specification but found Carter guilty of improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle in the shooting death of Resean Graham, 42, in a home on Griselda Avenue on the South Side.

And on Jan. 14, Per’asia Godfrey, 19, was found not guilty at trial of felonious assault in the stabbing of a woman on Cameron Avenue on the South Side during a fight involving a large number of people.

On the other hand, on Feb. 5, a jury found Dustin Ruiter guilty of 67 sex charges, including 33 counts of rape — 21 of them involving the forcible rape of a girl and 12 of them for the forcible rape of a second girl. A number of people entered into guilty pleas to avoid going to trial since the start of the year.