Convicted killer accused of strangling cellmate at Warren Correctional
A man serving time on a murder conviction is accused of strangling his cellmate to death in October at the Warren Correctional Institution in Lebanon.
Jedidiah Hayes Lang, 42, is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday in Warren County Common Pleas Court after a grand jury indicted him last week for two counts of murder and one count each of felonious assault and strangulation.
Lang “purposely caused the death of his cellmate,” according to a grand jury report.
His cellmate was identified as 31-year-old Cody S. Bartimus of Newark, who died Oct. 26, 2023, at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown, where he was taken from the Warren Correctional Institution.
“His cause of death was strangulation and the manner is homicide,” the Warren County Coroner’s Office reported.
Bartimus at the time of his death was near the end of a 5½-year prison term he received in 2018 for attempting to abduct a 4-year-old girl from a vehicle in June 2017 as her mother was strapping her into a car seat outside a child care facility, the Newark Advocate reported.
Lang was sentenced to 15 years to life after he pleaded guilty to murder in the 2013 death of Bradley Allen Grosscup, 52, of Mount Vernon in Knox County, 40 miles northeast of Columbus.
Grosscup’s body was found in his burned-out apartment. Investigators said Grosscup let Lang and his girlfriend move in with him because they were homeless. An autopsy found that Grosscup had been strangled, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
Lang is incarcerated at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown.