NILES, Ohio (WKBN) — Police activity in the unsolved beating death of a Youll Street man has picked up in recent weeks.

Police Captain John Marshall of the Detective Bureau said he hopes he can have something to announce later this year in the case of Raymond H. Bishop, 36, who died Feb. 26, 1990, after being found at his apartment in the 1900 block of Youll Street.

Officers who were called to his apartment about 3;20 a.m. found Bishop bleeding and conscious, but he was unable to speak. He was taken to MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, where he died a short time later.

Marshall said the case picked up speed in recent weeks after a piece of evidence that was collected was linked to a person of interest via the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.

Marshall, Detective Anthony Roberts and members of the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation are also working the case.

Newspaper accounts at the time said investigators think Bishop was beaten with a blunt object in his apartment because of the amount of blood they found. Bishop was able to leave his apartment and seek help throughout his building and answered the door when police came, but could give them no information before he died.

Investigators at the time were able to trace Bishop’s movements to the former Joshua II bar in the 2700 block of Market Street in Youngstown the night before he was killed and Youngstown police found his car at the bar, newspaper reports said.

Bishop was seen leaving the bar with a man and he was known to come to the bar once or twice a week, the newspaper reports said.

The evidence that was tested was done so after police were told through a tip that Bishop’s case was connected to another case, Marshall said. Although it turned out after the testing was done that those cases are not linked, the tests did reveal a link in the Bishop case to a person who was arrested in Portage County, Marshall said.

The evidence was tested a few years before the tip and investigators received no results then, Marshall said. After the tip was received and the evidence was tested again, investigators received the CODIS hit, Marshall said.

Anyone with information can leave a tip on the state attorney general’s website in the cold case section or call Niles police at 330-652-9944 and ask for Marshall.