By Leonardo BlairSenior reporter Wednesday, November 06, 2024

An Ohio woman who was wrongly accused and convicted in 1994 of physically and sexually abusing children in a Head Start program and then spent more than 15 years in prison before being exonerated said she sometimes felt that God he is not with her while she waits for her salvation.

But if it hadn’t been for her faith, Nancy Smith, 66, a former Head Start bus driver in Lorraine, Ohio, who had been sentenced to 30 to 90 years in prison for a crime she did not commit committed it WYSO said that he would have given up hope of going home.

“You can never lose faith. You can never lose hope,” she said.

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“You know, there was a time when I thought I would never go home. I’m 30-90 years old. I will never go home. But I never gave up my faith because I knew that… this was the time of man. This was not God’s time. And there were times when I thought He was not with me. … Where are you? you are not with me Why are you letting me go through this?” she recalled how she questioned God and her faith while suffering from wrongful incarceration.

“You have to stay there. You have to be strong,” she advised other wrongfully incarcerated individuals. “I have to … that’s one of the things that got me through prison (was) my faith.”

Smith, who was a single mother at the time of her arrest, was convicted along with Joseph Allen of alleged child abuse in 1994, despite both claiming their innocence, The Chronicle reports.

In February 2022, they were granted new trials and Lorain County District Attorney JD Tomlinson dismissed the charges against them, opening the door for Smith to file a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit in US District Court in Cleveland.

In her lawsuit filed earlier this year, Smith named the city of Lorain, Lorain County, Margaret Grondin, former Lorain County Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Rosenbaum and several former Lorain police officers as defendants.

Grondin sparked the accusations against Smith when she called Lorain police on May 7, 1993, to report that her 4-year-old daughter, known in court documents as NZ, had been sexually abused. Grondin alleged that NZ was abused in the Head Start program for pre-kindergarten children run by the Lorain County Community Action Agency.

Smith’s attorney, Elliot Slosar, argued in the lawsuit that Grondin’s claims were part of a “sinister insurance scam.”

“Grondin manipulated the children into repeating false allegations of sexual assault against Nancy for one reason only: a payday,” the lawsuit alleges. “To facilitate this scheme, Defendant Grondin fabricated false allegations of child sexual abuse against Nancy, a local Head Start school bus driver.”

Grondin’s son also said in an affidavit that she made up the allegations and coached him and his sister to sue the Head Start program for money.

The suit also claims that the investigating officers: Joel Miller, Russ Cambarare, Mark Carpentiere, Pete Rewak and former Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera, who died in 2022, should have found the allegations against Smith to be false through their investigation and that they had no probable cause to accuse her. Smith was falsely accused and convicted of rape, gross sexual assault, attempted rape and accessory to rape.

“Upon learning this exculpatory evidence, the defendant officers came to learn that the children were ‘possessed’ by their parents, gave inconsistent and illogical responses, and were not victims of sexual abuse,” the suit says. “The defendant officers buried this evidence from Nancy before the trial.”

The lawsuit highlights Lorain Police Detective Tom Cantu’s investigation into allegations against Smith in 1993. Cantu interviewed 11 of the children who rode Smith’s bus and asked them if they had even been hurt or “touched in any way river”.

“Each stated that (Smith) never touched them,” Cantu’s report said. “All the kids said they liked Nancy, their bus driver, and that she was nice.”