LEBANON, Ohio — A man already serving a 15-to-life prison sentence for murder has received another sentence after admitting to murdering his cellmate while in the Warren County Correctional Institute, according to the Warren County Prosecutor's Office.
Prosecutor David Fornshell announced on Monday that 43-year-old Jedidiah Lang, from Youngstown, pleaded guilty to murdering Cody Bartimus in 2023.
Lang was sentenced to serve 15 years to life, to run consecutively with the sentence he was already serving for a 2013 murder in Knox County, prosecutors said.
Officials said corrections staff found Bartimus unresponsive in his cell on October 26, 2023. He was taken to Atrium Medical Center, but was pronounced dead that evening; the Montgomery County Coroner's Office determined he'd died from strangulation.
Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers were called in to the prison to investigate. According to prosecutors, Lang told troopers he'd taken a towel from a clothesline and wrapped it around Bartimus' neck while pressing his knee into Bartimus' back, strangling him.
He also told troopers he'd known when his cellmate was dead because he had "done this before," prosecutors said.
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