BOARDMAN, Ohio (WKBN) – Police arrested a man on a public indecency charge after reports that he was exposing himself to people at the Southern Park Mall last year.
Friday, Boardman officers picked up the suspect, 25-year-old Matthew Wagner, from the Trumbull County Jail on a warrant for the public indecency charge.
According to police reports, the charge stems from an incident Dec. 27 at the Southern Park Mall.
A woman said she and her family were having lunch in the food court when a man walked up to their table and pulled down his sweatpants, exposing himself to them. The family reported that the man did not say or do anything else, just pulled up his pants and eventually walked away.
According to the police report, the woman’s daughters were highly upset about the incident.
Police say they were able to identify Wagner as the suspect as the woman took pictures of the man as he walked away, and her husband notified mall security, who escorted the suspect out of the mall.
The report says Wagner had a warrant for his arrest in Canton at the time, so he was transferred there by police after being escorted out of the mall. The warrant was for a failure to appear in court charge.
An initial report on the incident says the complainants had left the mall before officers arrived, and that officers were told that Wagner’s pants kept falling down because they were too big, causing him to expose himself to people at the mall.
The woman who reported the exposure incident came to the police department later to press charges, saying that after speaking with other people at the mall, she learned that Wagner exposed himself to others as well, including the “train conductor,” who reported that Wagner had been touching himself in front of people on the train ride.
Wagner was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday, but court records state that the court appearance was rescheduled.