Ohio doctor convicted of wife’s 2005 cyanide poisoning death gets 20-years-to-life in prison

Ohio doctor gets 20-to-life in wife’s poison death

CLEVELAND — Relatives of the victim sobbed and held each other as a judge handed down a life prison term Tuesday for a doctor convicted of killing his wife by lacing her calcium supplement with cyanide so he could be with his mistress.

Yazeed Essa, 41, won’t be eligible for parole for at least 20 years.

Essa, who didn’t testify at his trial, softly said “yes” when Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Deena Calabrese asked if he wanted to pass up a chance to comment at his sentencing.

But relatives of the victims spoke up, staring him down in an emotionally charged courtroom and challenging him to own up to the slaying.

“Are you a man,” asked the victim’s brother, Dominic DiPuccio. “It’s your last chance to save your soul, right here, right now.”

Essa was convicted last week of lacing his wife’s calcium supplement with cyanide in 2005. Rosemarie Essa collapsed while driving and crashed her car into another vehicle near the couple’s suburban Cleveland home.

Essa, dressed in an orange jail suit and with his hands cuffed in front of him, pushed back in his chair and mostly looked straight ahead as the parents, siblings and friends of his wife spoke to the judge before the sentence was imposed.

Essa wiped his eyes with a tissue at one point, when DiPuccio read a statement that he said he had drafted on behalf of the couple’s 7- and 9-year-old children. They are being raised by her family.

“We hold our mommy close to our hearts at night,” the statement said. It said the children miss their mother, especially during holiday and special family events.

“She is nowhere to be found except in our hearts,” read DiPuccio as family members who packed the courtroom clutched each other and cried. The judge, taking a deep breath, kept casting her eyes downward.

Prosecutors claimed the former emergency room doctor at an Akron hospital killed his wife so he could be with a mistress. The defense tried to blame the killing on a jealous mistress who wanted to marry Essa.

Essa’s attorneys said their client couldn’t afford a lawyer to handle an appeal and would seek a court-appointed attorney.

Essa’s brother, Firas Essa, who changed his testimony and told jurors the defendant admitted to the killing, declined comment after the sentencing.

The defendant’s mistress, a nurse, testified that Essa asked before his wife’s death if she would stay “if something bad were to happen.”

Rosemarie Essa died after taking a calcium tablet and crashing her SUV into an oncoming car near the couple’s home in Gates Mills. No one in the other car was hurt. Yazeed Essa, a Detroit native whose family is from a Palestinian territory, fled to Lebanon after police seized drug bottles at his home.