Mihaljevic tip line email still broke

The email address Bay Village police use for tips from the public about the unsolved homicide of Amy Milhaljevec has been malfunctioning for weeks, rejecting incoming messages. The Register first learned the address was inoperable when making inquiries about a Huron County woman's report about a man who assaulted her whom she suspected might have been involved in the 10-year-old's murder in 1989. Detective Jay Elish said on Oct. 16 the department was experiencing technical difficulties but that the problem was being addressed. All the other police department emails were similarly malfunctioning at the time. Elish declined to confirm at that time whether the Bay Village police intended to interview the Huron County man, suggesting that the crime he allegedly committed in 2023 — assaulting the Huron County woman — was dissimilar to Milhaljevec's homicide. But the woman who reported her concerns to him said there were remarkable similarities in some of the circumstances. Sources said the man who assaulted her had lived near the shopping center where Milhaljevec was abducted. He later also lived in close proximity to where the girl's body was found, according to sources. Amy Mihaljevic, 10, was kidnapped on Oct. 27, 1989, from the Bay Square Shopping Center parking lot in Bay Village, a suburb of Cleveland. Her body was found nearly four months later, in February 1990, in a farm field in rural Ashland County. Her killer has never been brought to justice. The Huron County man also fits the height and weight descriptions and looks eerily similar — although much older — to the sketch of a suspect police used in 1989 after talking with witnesses who saw Milhaljevec with a man at the shopping center before she disappeared. Elish, when he spoke to a reporter in October, said a lot of people fit the description of the suspect police used back then. Do it again The Huron County Sheriff's Office failed to file any report after the Huron County woman filed a complaint last year, a source told the Register, and failed to follow up with her to get her assailant charged. The Huron County prosecutor's office did later file charges but at the last court hearing was considering a plea deal that would allow the man to seek treatment instead of a jail term. Similarly, about 10 years ago, he made a plea deal to avoid jail when after he was accused of holding three people at gunpoint in Lorain County. The man was arrested in March and briefly jailed before being released on his own recognizance. The sheriff's office has declined to say if the man was ever a suspect in any other criminal complaints.