Staff photo / Ed Runyan Marcus C. Cobb, 62, of Tampa Avenue, apologized in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on Wednesday for his attack on a man last June near Cobb’s home but said the man “pushed me to the limit. And I exploded.” His attorney, at right, is Mark Lavelle. Cobb was sentenced to two to three years in prison.

YOUNGSTOWN — Marcus G. Cobb, 62, of Tampa Avenue, was sentenced to two to three years in prison Wednesday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court after being convicted at trial of felonious assault in a dispute with a man doing yard work near Cobb’s home who had once called Cobb a degrading name.

Prosecutors said Cobb was charged with felonious assault after a June 24, 2025, incident in which he “without warning, whacked (the victim) on the head and his back multiple times with a metal pipe.”

The victim was weed whacking around a fence at a business on East Indianola Avenue on the South Side at the time of the assault, Mahoning County Assistant Prosecutor Kristie Weibling said at Cobb’s trial.

During the trial, Cobb’s attorney, Mark Lavelle, called the object Cobb used a “stick” and described the victim as having engaged in repeated verbal harassment of Cobb by using racial and other slurs toward Cobb when Cobb walked past the property the victim maintained and lived inside of. Lavelle said the property is the former Bugno Towing.

The victim admitted to calling Cobb a name one time a year earlier, Lavelle said. Lavelle said that over time, the victim had chased Cobb with a lawnmower, used the mower to throw gravel at Cobb, and followed Cobb on the mower to the store and then hit Cobb with gravel from the parking lot. Lavelle said the victim used derogatory language toward Cobb “daily.”

During the sentencing hearing Wednesday, Assistant Prosecutor Katherine Jones told Judge Anthony D’Apolito that prosecutors had offered Cobb a plea deal of 3 to 4 1/2 years in prison for Cobb to plead guilty in the case. She said prosecutors were going to “stand by that offer” in their sentencing recommendation.

Jones noted that D’Apolito heard the testimony in the trial as he presided over it, adding that the victim, who testified, “clearly had some cognitive limitations, and he testified to the injuries he suffered.”

She said the victim was not in attendance at the hearing but had indicated in the past “the fear he still has of” Cobb. She said D’Apolito was able to see surveillance video that showed that the victim was “weed whacking along the fence line when (Cobb) approached and struck him repeatedly with some type of pipe object, once to the head and multiple times to the back.”

She said Cobb’s actions were “not a split-second reaction to a threat but a deliberate act of violence.” Jones said, “Even accepting the defendant’s version of events that after a long history of hateful words and a belief that the victim scratched his vehicle and blew him a kiss, those allegations don’t justify what occurred. The defendant had lawful means to address those issues and instead ambushed the victim with a pipe and struck him repeatedly.”

Lavelle said Wednesday that Cobb has lived a “law-abiding, mind-your-own-business kind of life for the past 15 years, walking up and down the streets of Youngstown, where one should be able to walk to the store unmolested. That was never the case. So whether this victim has cognitive difficulties or is slow or whatever it is doesn’t justify what Cobb put up with lo these many years. And there was more than just name-calling.”

Lavelle said the victim chased Cobb with a lawn mower, had his property damaged, had the victim on his property.” Lavelle said he hoped what the judge learned at the trial would influence him to give Cobb a more favorable sentence than prosecutors were recommending.

He said Cobb reacted to a “litany of offenses which had occurred over a course of years.” Lavelle said in talking with the jurors, they would have been satisfied finding Cobb guilty of a lesser offense, but it was not offered to them because Cobb would not allow Lavelle to press for a jury instruction of that type.

“He wanted an absolute acquittal, and he did not want to give the jury this option to compromise,” Lavelle said.

Cobb then spoke, saying that the victim claimed to be afraid of Cobb, but the victim did not demonstrate that by his actions. The evening of the incident, the victim “was riding past my house waving at people on my porch. He continues to wave at my friends. He thinks this is a joke. I think he played me and played you all.”

Cobb apologized and said, “I was wrong for what I did, but … he pushed me to the limit. And I exploded. I apologize for that.”

Cobb got credit for 60 days already spent in the Mahoning County jail toward his sentence.

D’Apolito said he hates what the victim said to Cobb, but “There never is a time where a court or a judge can allow someone to do what you did to another person unless it is in pure self-defense, and this was not.” He added, “No matter what someone might say to you, the remedy, the response is never to go and take the law into your own hands and take justice into your own hands. It’s call the police. It’s call a lawyer, a thousand different things.”