Woman exonerated after spending over 15 years in prison worried God wasn't with her

An Ohio woman who was wrongfully charged and convicted in 1994 of physical and sexual abuse against children in a Head Start program and then spent more than 15 years in prison before she was exonerated said she sometimes felt God wasn't with her as she waited for her redemption.

Had it not been for her faith, however, Nancy Smith, 66, a former Head Start bus driver from Lorraine, Ohio, who had been sentenced to spend 30 to 90 years in prison for a crime she did not commit, told WYSO that she 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 doing 30 to 90 years. I'm never going to go home. But I never gave up my faith because I knew that … this was man's time. This was not God's time. And there were times when I thought He was not with me. ... Where are you? You're not with me. Why are you letting me go through this?” she recalled about how she questioned God and her faith as she suffered through her wrongful incarceration.

“You gotta hang in there. You've got to be strong,” she advised other wrongfully incarcerated individuals. “You have to ... that is 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 for the alleged abuses against the children in 1994 despite both claiming their innocence, The Chronicle reported.

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

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

Grondin triggered the charges against Smith when she called the police in Lorain on May 7, 1993, and reported that her 4-year-old daughter, known in court documents as N.Z., had been sexually abused. Grondin alleged N.Z. was abused at the Head Start program for pre-Kindergarten children run by the Lorain County Community Action Agency.

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

“Grondin manipulated children into repeating false allegations of sexual assault against Nancy for one reason: a pay day,” the lawsuit alleges. “To facilitate this scheme, defendant Grondin manufactured false allegations of child sexual assault against Nancy, a local school bus driver for Head Start.”

Grondin’s son also reportedly said in a sworn statement that she made up the allegations and coached him and his sister on what to say to sue the Head Start program for money.

The lawsuit further alleges 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 charge her. Smith was falsely charged and convicted of rape, gross sexual imposition, attempted rape, and complicity to rape.

“After learning of this exculpatory evidence, the defendant officers came to learn that the children were 'coaxed' by parents, provided incoherent and illogical responses and were not the victims of sexual abuse,” the lawsuit said. “The defendant officers buried this exculpatory evidence from Nancy prior to trial.”

The lawsuit highlights the investigation conducted by Lorain police detective Tom Cantu into the allegations against Smith in 1993. Cantu interviewed 11 of the children that rode on Smith’s bus and asked if they had even been hurt or “touched in a bad way.”

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