Jurors in the trial of Derek Tussing, 32, deliberated into the evening Tuesday before returning guilty verdicts on two of the three charges against the Allen County man.
J Swygart | The Lima News
LIMA — Jurors deliberated for less than two hours Tuesday before returning guilty verdicts on charges of robbery and grand theft of a motor vehicle against an Allen County man charged with commandeering a vehicle and crashing it into a grain elevator in Cairo in October of 2022, causing serious injuries to an employee there.
On an additional charge of felonious assault, the most serious of the three counts, jurors found rural Cairo resident Derek Tussing not guilty.
Tussing, 32, told jurors in Allen County Common Pleas Court he was high on methamphetamines and was experiencing hallucinations at the time of the incident. He testified that he believed his daughter was being held hostage atop a catwalk atop the grain bins at the elevator.
During his time on the witness stand Tuesday, Tussing admitted approaching a woman he did not know who was in a car near the elevator for help. When she rejected his pleas, Tussing said he climbed into an unoccupied truck and rammed it into a silo at the elevator. In the process the truck struck Richard Stemen, an employee at the Cairo Grain Elevator, and left him with life-threatening injuries.
Tussing was indicted by a grand jury in February of this year on charges of robbery, grand theft of a motor vehicle and felonious assault. His trial began Monday in the courtroom of Judge Terri Kohlrieser.
Tuesday’s testimony was contentious as Kohlrieser repeatedly admonished Tussing for speaking with family members and prosecutors during the proceedings. Defense attorney Kenneth Rexford also clashed with the judge after Tussing volunteered that his actions on the day in question amounted to what he now knows to be “complete insanity.”
Kohlrieser chastised Rexford for allowing any suggestion of “insanity” or “mental illness” to be brought before jurors. She said the defendant’s state of mind on Oct. 29, 2022, was a result of his choice to ingest illicit drugs and was not a permitted line of defense.
“There is no law in Ohio that negates voluntary intoxication if drugs are purchased from an illegal source,” the judge said.
Earlier during Tuesday’s proceedings Deputy Alan Ogle of the Allen County Sheriff’s Office testified that upon his arrival at the grain elevator on the day in question Tussing was lying on the ground with another deputy standing over him with his service weapon drawn. Jurors then watched cruiser dash camera footage of Tussing attempting to flee from deputies on foot before being Tased, falling to the ground and being taken into custody.
