Pictured are Frank Q. Jackson (wearing sweatshirt), his step grandfather, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson (wearing beard), the city's third Black mayor, and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Mike O'Malley (wearing gray suit)
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By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O'Malley said Wednesday that Frank Q. Jackson, the 22-year-old grandson of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson who pleaded not guilty on Monday when he was arraigned on four felony charges stemming from a June 10 incident in which the younger Jackson is accused of strangling and viciously assaulting an 18-year old Black woman with a metal truck hitch, is now the prime suspect in homicide that led police to the mayor's home late last month.
The Black community remains torn over the controversy, some Black leaders saying the mayor's family is a reflection of the mayor and others saying that parents and grandparents are not responsible for the behavior of their grown children and grown grandchildren.
Nonetheless, it is a political Alcatraz for the mayor, who is Black.
The younger Jackson is in custody in the Cuyahoga County Jail and has posted 10 percent of his a $25,000 bond in the assault case, jail administrators saying he cannot be released due to a shortage of GPS ankle monitors, an excuse often used, public records reveal, to keep Black and other defendants erroneously in the county jail, a jail where nine inmates have died in roughly under a year.
The FBI is swarming the jail, and several its affiliates, including six jail guards and the former jail warden and former jail director, were indicted this year.
The younger Jackson's assault case has been assigned to the docket of Common Pleas Judge John P. O'Donnell, chief city prosecutor Karrie Howard, an unsuccessful candidate for a common pleas judge seat in 2018, under fire for passing on charges in that case as is O' Malley, who pushed for the indictment relative to the alleged assault only after the matter became public.
Frank Q. Jackson has not yet been indicted regarding last month's homicide.
The homicide at issue stems from an Aug 28 incident outside of a barbershop on the city's largely White west side.
Antonio Parra, 30, of Warrensville Heights, was standing outside of a barber shop in the 5000 block of Clark Avenue when he was approached by two men in black hoodies who allegedly shot him multiple times and ran off.
Parra died at the scene.
A witness later gave police a license plate number of a vehicle spotted leaving the crime scene that is registered to the mayor’s grandson.
While the younger Jackson carries the mayor's last name, he is the biological grandson of the mayor's longtime wife, Edwina Jackson, and the mayor's step grandson.
Authorities later towed the car that police say is evidence in the homicide investigation from the mayor's home driveway in the Central Neighborhood on the city's largely Black east side.
O'Malley said that the younger Jackson is the prime suspect in the homicide.
“Certainly, we have no other explanation as to any other potential drivers of his vehicle, so certainly he would be considered a suspect,” O'Malley told reporters on Wednesday.
O'Malley has called for authorities other than Cleveland police to investigate since current police chief Calvin Williams, who is Black, reports to the mayor and is appointed to an at-will position by him, a Cleveland police spokesperson saying in response that police have no intention of turning the homicide investigation over to outside authorities.
Police may not have a choice if a judge gets involved per O'Malley's insistence.
A former Cleveland City Council president, Jackson, 72, is the city's third Black mayor who is serving a historic fourth term in office.
Authorities said the younger Jackson, who has had other brushes with the law, is allegedly violent.
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