COCHRANTON —
“This isn’t supposed to happen here,” Mark Roche said recently. “It’s something you hear about in big cities.”
Roche, a Cochranton-area businessman and a member of small eastern Crawford County community’s borough council, was talking about the May 17 murder of 20-year-old Ohio resident Brandy M. Stevens. His reaction came after details of the case emerged during this week’s preliminary hearings for 20-year-old Ashley Marie Barber and 19-year-old Jade Nichole Olmstead, who stand accused of brutally attacking Stevens and burying her alive in a shallow grave near their Drake Hill Road residence about five miles east of the borough.
Roche said he and his daughter were “horrified by the whole thing” after seeing and reading news accounts of the case, which were reported in detail in Thursday’s Meadville Tribune following Barber’s and Olmstead’s preliminary hearings Wednesday before Vernon Township-area Magisterial District Judge Michael Rossi.
Others in the area had similar reactions.
It’s “strange for a small town,” said lifelong Cochranton resident Janet Hopkins. “I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of any other murder” being committed in the community.
“It’s pretty sad,” Hopkins said of the alleged circumstances surrounding the case.
According to Crawford County prosecutors, Barber and Olmstead have admitted to conspiring together and killing Stevens, a Youngstown State University student with whom Olmstead reportedly had an intimate relationship during a previous break-up with Barber.
In providing details on the alleged attack and cause of Stevens’ death, forensic examiners noted sustained blunt force trauma to the head including 15 lacerations to the scalp; multiple scalp and facial injuries; a skull fracture and hemorrhage; blunt force trauma to the body; a ligature around the neck; evidence of suffocation including an article of clothing placed in her mouth; and evidence of suffocation involving “organic and earthen ground liquid.”
“It’s a sad tragedy,” Kent Haines, associate pastor at Cochranton Community Church, said of the case. “As humans, we’re capable of awful things ... (and) it seems like our society has gotten coarser.”
Haines said he’s previously spoken with some teens involved in the church about the case, and said it’s possible the topic may be discussed in a religious context with the broader congregation during upcoming church services.
Barber and Olmstead are charged by Pennsylvania State Police with one count each of criminal homicide, conspiracy to commit criminal homicide and tampering with physical evidence.
Both were bound over to Crawford County Court of Common Pleas following the recent preliminary hearings. They’re tentatively scheduled to appear Aug. 24 for their formal arraignments, and both remain jailed without bond at Crawford County jail, Saegertown.
District Attorney Francis Schultz recently said he’s weighing his options in regard to considering it a death penalty case and will make that decision closer to a trial date, which is not yet determined.
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In Cochranton, residents horrified, saddened by murder's details
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