YOUNGSTOWN — Attorney David Betras again has filed a motion asking Judge John Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to dismiss aggravated murder charges against Lavontae Knight because former Assistant Prosecutor Dawn Cantalamessa “sat on” evidence that was helpful to Knight’s defense.

This request, however, is for a different aggravated murder case against Knight than the one that resulted in Durkin removing Cantalamessa from a case involving Knight last July.

Thursday’s filing is in a case in which Knight, 26, of Ferndale Avenue, is accused of killing Trevice Harris and wounding a woman with him Dec. 20, 2018, as two men drove Harris and the woman around until Harris was shot to death and the woman was injured.

The woman got into the driver’s seat and drove to a South Side Shell gas station with Harris and called 911.

The case from which the judge removed Cantalamessa involves aggravated murder charges against Knight in the Oct. 25, 2018, killing of Josh Donatelli, 26, at Donatelli’s home on Imperial Street on the West Side.

A hearing is set for 8:30 a.m. Tuesday before Durkin for evidence to be presented to help the judge decide what to do about Betras’ request for charges to be dismissed or to postpone the trial, which is set to begin March 7.

Betras’ filing states that he and his co-counsel, Patrick Kiraly, became aware of the additional evidence Feb. 22 when Mahoning County prosecutors provided Betras and Kiraly with a “supplemental” packet of evidence in the case in preparation for the trial. The additional information was that on April 19, 2019, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification provided a report to the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office indicating that DNA taken from the back seat of the vehicle in which Harris was killed belonged to “an unknown male,” the filing states.

And on April 30, 2019, detective Chad Zubal of the Youngstown Police Department received notification from BCI that the DNA of the unknown man belonged to a named man not charged in the case. On June 11, 2019, the surviving witness was unable to identify the man whose DNA was found in the back of the vehicle, the filing states.

The filing maintains that Cantalamessa violated Knight’s rights by not telling the defense about the other man’s DNA and instead “sat on” this evidence Betras says is helpful to the defense.

The motion theorizes Cantalamessa did this because earlier that month, she gave a “once-in-a-lifetime deal” to a co-defendant in the other Lavontae Knight murder case in order to get him to testify in the other murder case.

Cantalamessa was reached by telephone Friday afternoon. She said she questions how she can be responsible for the defense not getting evidence until this month when she has been gone from the office for eight months. She now works as an assistant prosecutor in Ashtabula County.

“I’ve never been the only prosecutor on it,” she added of this Knight case. “I can’t really comment on it because I don’t have anything in front of me. It’s been so long (since she looked at this case) because we were always so focused on the other one,” she said of Knight’s other murder case.

She noted that prosecutors gave the defense in the Harris case pretrial evidence, known as discovery, numerous times over the course of the more than three years since the murder, but she no longer has access to that information to know “what they say.”

Cantalamessa has filed to run against Sean O’Brien for Trumbull County Common Pleas Court judge in the May Democratic primary.

In July, Durkin removed Cantalamessa from Knight’s murder case in the Donatelli killing, saying she showed a “careless indifference to ascertaining the truth” and made a false statement to the court in the Knight-Donatelli case.

Durkin wrote that Cantalamessa “failed to periodically and regularly review her case file.” Had she called (Youngstown Police Department) detective Michael Lambert about evidence in the case in 2019 or 2020, she would have discovered that evidence helpful to the defense regarding a failed photo lineup never made it to the defendant’s attorney as required, the judge stated in a ruling.

“This failure, especially given the defendant’s repeated requests for additional evidence concerning the eyewitness, can best be characterized as a careless indifference to ascertaining the truth,” the judge stated in the ruling.

The judge also found that Cantalamessa made a false statement during a Dec. 3, 2019, hearing because she told Durkin and Betras that a co-defendant in the Knight-Donatelli case never identified Knight as being the shooter in the killing.

But in April 2019, the co-defendant did identify Knight as the shooter — in a meeting with Cantalamessa, Assistant Prosecutor Michael Rich and the co-defendant’s attorney, the ruling states. That conversation was part of a plea agreement with the co-defendant requiring cooperation with prosecutors.