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A 31-year-old Steubenville man admitted Thursday he was responsible for the 2021 shooting death of a man who had been sitting on the steps in front of a property in the 1400 block of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Michaelis M. Forster, 3126 state Route 213, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter with specifications that he’d used a firearm to take the life of 44-year-old Terald “Tink” Herring on June 20, 2021.

Jefferson County Common Pleas Judge Michelle Miller sentenced Forster to between 11 and 16.5 years on the manslaughter charge, plus a mandatory three-year term for using a gun in commission of a crime and another year, also mandatory, for firing the gun across a public roadway. Those sentences will be served consecutively, beginning with the gun charges, and Forster won’t be eligible for parole for at least 15 years, though he will be credited for the nearly three years he’s been behind bars awaiting trial.

Herring, who had no fixed address, was shot five times — once in the chest, once in the back, twice in one leg and once in the other — while he sat in front of the Pennsylvania Avenue property with several bags of pre-packaged food he’d been given.

“By all accounts Mr. Herring was just sitting there,” Prosecutor Jane Hanlin said Friday. “There’s no interaction between the two of them, there’s no communication at all. It’s a drive-by… he literally shoots from his vehicle.”

Shell casings found at the scene matched casings found lodged in the windshield wiper well of Forster’s car, though investigators were unable to locate the murder weapon.

Hanlin said the Herring family was consulted in advance of the deal.

“We worked closely with the representative from Mr. Herring’s family and they shared our concerns,” she said. “They wanted to both make sure that (Forster) was punished for what he did, but they also wanted to make sure that the community was safe. And it’s one of those cases where you want to avoid any risk that (a juror) has too much sympathy for him because he had some mental health problems, so it was as important to them as it was to us that he both be removed from the community and punished for what he did and that we eliminate any risk that there would be any reason why he wouldn’t be sent to prison.”

She said Forster went through a couple of different psychological competency evaluations “and they found that he was competent and sane” to stand trial, “though they also said he had a profound history of mental health problems.”

“His mental health problems were exacerbated by the fact that he used a lot of illegal drugs instead of the medication that he was prescribed,” she added.

Hanlin said she’s pleased he’ll be off the streets.

“What I said to the judge during the sentencing was that I think Michaelis Forster is one of the more dangerous people that we’ve had here because he does have serious mental health issues, and he does not seem to have any insight into them,” she said.

Forster’s trial had been slated to begin today.