Relatives of a woman who was fatally shot last fall said Wednesday they would honor her memory in part by forgiving her killer.
“It doesn’t mean that what you did was OK,” Samuel Rodriguez, grandfather of Elisha Meraz, 32, told Deondrae Ballard before his sentencing in Lucas County Common Pleas Court while reading a prepared statement written jointly by his family. “But I refuse to let hate live in my heart.”
Judge Michael Goulding made no comments of his own about the case before sentencing Ballard to prison for an agreed-upon 25-year term, with 206 days’ credit for time already served…