By Cory Shaffer
cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A man who sped through an accident scene on Interstate 90 and struck and killed Cleveland firefighter Johnny Tetrick last fall is now a convicted murderer.
Leander Bissell, 41, faces a mandatory life sentence after Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Timothy McCormick delivered his verdict Thursday.
McCormick said that he initially believed that it was “a stretch” for prosecutors to charge Bissell with murder.
“This initial reaction was wrong,” McCormick said. “This turned out to be the right indictment.”
McCormick also found Bissell guilty of felonious assault, involuntary manslaughter, aggravated vehicular homicide, failure to comply with a police order and leaving the scene of an accident.
He set an Aug. 9 sentencing date.
Members of Tetrick’s family, including his widow and three adult daughters, wore T-shirts memorializing the veteran firefighter to the hearing.
The courtroom was silent as McCormick read the verdict. Two of his daughters cried after the verdict was read, and a third smiled. Tetrick’s daughters hugged each other for several minutes.
Bissell chose to have McCormick render a verdict rather than a jury when his trial began Monday.
Bissell’s attorneys, public defenders Tim Huber and Daryl Dennie, argued during the trial that first responders, including Tetrick and his Engine 22 company crew, did not properly position their vehicles to block traffic and that Bissell had a reason to believe that the lane he was driving in was open.
In closing arguments delivered Tuesday, Dennie compared Tetrick and other first responders crossing the highway while traffic was still moving in two lanes to lawyers jaywalking across the street outside the Cuyahoga County Justice Center.
Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Carl Mazzone called the argument ridiculous.
“The closing argument you just heard would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting,” Mazzone opened his argument to the judge.
Prosecutors did not accuse Bissell of purposefully killing Tetrick. Instead, they argued that Bissell should have known that he risked hitting someone when he was the only person to drive around a police car blocking traffic. Bissell sped through the scene at nearly 50 mph. That would make him guilty of felonious assault, and the murder charge accused him of killing Tetrick while committing the assault, Mazzone said.
“The risk he created was, ‘I’m going to drive around because I’m a special person who shouldn’t have to sit in traffic,’” Mazzone said.
Tetrick was a 27-year department veteran when his Engine 22 company was called to a crash about 8:15 p.m. on Nov. 19. A car had flipped over in the left lane of I-90 east, just after the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard exit, and an off-duty Cleveland police officer had stopped on the right shoulder.
Several police cars pulled into the left two lanes to funnel traffic to the right two lanes in the minutes after the crash.
Ohio Department of Transportation cameras captured video showing Bissell’s white Chevrolet Malibu drive around the police cars to avoid the traffic jam that was forming.
The driver of an 18-wheeler that was at the front of the jam started taking video of the scene with his cellphone to send to his company to document why he was stopped and recorded Tetrick’s death.
Tetrick, who had walked to the right shoulder, jogged back over into the second lane from the left, which he believed was closed to traffic. Tetrick bent over to pick up a piece of debris from the flipped car with his back to traffic. Bissell slammed his Malibu into Tetrick and launched his body more than 100 feet across the highway. A Bratenahl police detective testified that he calculated Bissell was driving 49 mph when he struck Tetrick. The force of the impact ripped off pieces of the Malibu’s front bumper.
Investigators used the debris to figure out that the car was a white Malibu, and then got a list of all similar cars registered to owners with addresses on Cleveland’s East Side, where the car exited the highway. That gave them Bissell’s name and address on Ridpath Avenue. Investigators found surveillance video from an apartment building next to Bissell’s showing him parking the Malibu with front-end damage minutes after Tetrick was struck.
Police arrested Bissell about four hours after the Tetrick’s death.
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