A former co-defendant in the June 2022 shooting death of an Ohio man implicated defendant Daniel C. Lloyd, of Pitcairn, on Wednesday, the third day of his homicide trial in Common Pleas Court.

Nicole Schwartz, 39, of Ellwood City, whose homicide case was severed from Lloyd’s and has been continued, testified that she sold drugs with the victim, Frederick Orr, 32, of Columbus, and agreed to a plan to kill him after he was released from prison on June 11.

Schwartz said she met Orr in May 2022 through a friend and that led to him staying at her home while he sold drugs in Butler. She said she would drive Orr to Butler and to Columbus.

She said her relationship with Orr was intimate, but he was abusive and aggressive.

After a short time, she said, she wanted to stop the drug activity at her house so they began selling drugs from a friend’s house in Butler.

Then Orr got arrested, and Schwartz said she didn’t think he would get released because he was wanted on a warrant in Ohio and would be sent there.

She found crack cocaine and about $3,000 he hid in her house, and said she used most of the crack, but sold some and used the money to make a car payment, pay her rent and pay her son’s girlfriend’s rent.

Schwartz said she met Lloyd through a friend while Orr was in jail and they developed an intimate relationship and he gave her drugs. She said Lloyd had a gun, which he left at her house because she said she might need it if Orr got out of jail.

She said Orr had been trying to call her from prison, and she believed he was trying to get released from jail.

On June 10, she said Orr reached her from a phone in the prison lobby, said he had been released and wanted her to pick him up immediately.

“I was scared,” Schwartz said. “I knew he’d want to know what happened to the money.”

She said she told him she didn’t have her vehicle, told him to walk to the house in Butler they sold drugs from, and said she would pick him up there later.

She said she then called Lloyd and told him she wanted to leave and spend the weekend at a hotel to avoid Orr. She said she drove to her home where she picked up her baby daughter and grabbed Lloyd’s gun. She said Dylan Hinchberger, one of her sons, helped her pack her car.

Schwartz said she drove to the Longhorn Corral in Franklin Township where her other son, Dakota Hinchberger, and his girlfriend, Tamika Cottrill, were staying and then picked up Lloyd and returned to the Longhorn.

Dylan Hinchberger and Cottrill testified Tuesday.

Dakota Hinchberger and Lloyd went inside the hotel room and Schwartz waited in her car with her daughter and Cottrill, Schwartz said.

Everybody then gathered in the hotel room, where she said she agreed with a plan that was “already decided” to kill Orr near a spring on Kelly Road in Muddy Creek Township.

“It was already decided … It was presented. That’s the only option,” Schwartz said.

The plan was to pick up Orr with Lloyd hiding in her SUV and killing Orr at the spring, she said. Schwartz said Dakota Hinchberger came up with the idea to take Orr to the spring.

When she and Lloyd left the Longhorn, Lloyd hid under a blanket in the back of the SUV and they picked up Orr, she said.

On the way to Kelly Road, state police pulled over the vehicle near the fairgrounds for an expired registration and let her go with a warning, she said. The troopers who pulled her over also have testified.

When they arrived at the spring, Schwartz said she told Orr she wanted to look under the hood to find the cause of an unusual noise. She said she opened the hood and tried to get Orr to help, but he wouldn’t get out of the SUV.

She said she then heard Orr say something and then heard gunshots. Lloyd asked for help getting Orr out of the vehicle and eventually pushed him out, she said.

A nearby resident’s security camera recorded the sound of gunshots around 1:50 a.m., according to previous testimony.

Police testified that slugs and spent shell casings from a .45-caliber handgun were recovered later from the scene and the SUV.

Schwartz said she drove with Lloyd to her house with the passenger side window shot out. When they arrived, Lloyd asked where she kept bleach, and she walked to Dylan Hinchberger’s girlfriend’s nearby house and asked him to come to her house, she said.

Dylan Hinchberger cleared out the garage, pulled the SUV inside, helped Lloyd tape cardboard over the garage door windows and then left, she said.

Schwartz said she called Harry Koch, of Butler, who testified earlier in the day that he trades rides for drugs with Lloyd. Koch picked up Schwartz and Lloyd at Schwartz’s house, and they dropped him off at work before taking his vehicle to Pittsburgh, she said.

They went to a drugstore to buy provisions for a stay in an apartment that Lloyd had arranged, she said.

Some days later, Schwartz said Dylan Hinchberger called her and said the police towed her SUV from her home.

During the 10 days they spent in the apartment, she said she became afraid one day when Lloyd came back and said he had talked to police.

“I was scared. I was the only witness,” Schwartz said.

Soon after that, she said she walked to a nearby store and bought a phone that she used to call her daughter’s father in Florida, who drove to the apartment and took her and the baby to a hotel.

Schwartz said she then called police, and then met with them on June 24. She said she gave a false statement even though investigators “seemed to already know what happened.”

She eventually made a truthful statement, she said.

In exchange for her truthful testimony, she said the district attorney’s office has offered a prison sentence of nine to 20 years followed by five years of probation.