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Motion filed, jury trial postponed for dog warden

LISBON –Next week’s scheduled jury trial for former County Dog Warden Dawn Croft has been postponed following a motion filed last week by her attorney requesting her statements to investigators be suppressed.

Croft, 42, Bacon Avenue, East Palestine, is charged with theft in office, money laundering and tampering with records. She’s accused of taking about $26,263 from the Columbiana County Dog Pound beginning in January 2015 and continuing through April 2016.

According to court records, Croft completed the thefts by voiding receipts for cash and converting them; accepting cash without providing receipts and converting them; and finally stealing cash received which she allegedly concealed by submitting false pay-in records to the County Auditor.

However on Friday, Croft’s defense attorney Chris Amato filed a motion to suppress statements Croft reportedly made on April 28, 2016, to Chief Jim Brown, who was at that time serving as the investigator for the County Prosecutor’s Office.

Instead of a jury trial, which was scheduled for next week in Common Pleas Court, Croft’s case has now been set for a hearing on the motion to suppress the statement, which Amato argues was in violation of Croft’s rights against custodial interrogation, self-incrimination and right to have counsel present.

The case includes information gained through an audit by the state auditor’s office of Dave Yost, before he became state attorney general.

Croft now has a suppression hearing scheduled on the motion on April 5 and her jury trial has been rescheduled for May 1.

Judge Megan Bickerton told both attorneys, Amato and Chief Assistant Prosecutor John Gamble, she knows Croft professionally while they were working together on dog abuse cases when Bickerton was with the County Prosecutor’s Office, but does not feel it would create a problem.

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