Ex-girlfriend says she was threatened by accused killer

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By Tom Beyerlein, Staff Writer Updated 11:56 PM Wednesday, February 3, 2010

A longtime girlfriend of Tommy Swint said she obtained a temporary restraining order against Swint in Dayton Municipal Court in 1998 because he threatened to kill her and her family.

“It was hell dealing with him,” Antonia Star of Las Vegas said in a telephone interview Wednesday, Feb. 3. “He threatened to kill me, my mother, my son — put a bullet through each of our heads.”

Star, formerly Tonia Wilson, said she eventually left the state because she was afraid of Swint, the former Trotwood police officer and state prison guard who killed himself as police in Alabama prepared to arrest him on a murder indictment out of Dayton.

Asked if she thought Swint was capable of murder, Star said: “Absolutely.”

She said Swint, a former Marine who served in Panama in 1989, told her “he used to kill people (while in the Marines) and he still had the urge to kill people. He told me that on one of our first dates.”

She said she met Swint in 1996 and soon became pregnant with Swint’s daughter. At the time, she said, Swint worked part-time at a Dayton “prostitute motel.”

She said she told a Dayton detective who called her in November or December that she had never heard of Tina Marie Ivery, the woman Swint is accused of killing here in 1991. The detective told her local authorities had recently visited Alabama to take a full set of Swint’s fingerprints. “They said the weird thing was, he didn’t say if he did it or not and he didn’t ask why they were fingerprinting him.”

Star said she and Swint broke up in 2001, the same year as the disappearance of Marilyn “Niqui” McCown of Richmond, Ind., a co-worker of Swint’s at a Dayton state prison.

In 2007, Trotwood police officials fired Swint two months after he was hired, after Richmond police told them that Swint was a suspect in McCown’s disappearance.

Star said Swint phoned her after his firing, but he didn’t tell her the true reason he was dismissed. “He sounded real shook up and was thinking about killing himself then,” she said.

McCown’s sister, Tammy Hughes, said Wednesday evening she was “just happy the (Ivery) family has closure.” She called Swint a “person of interest” in her sister’s disappearance, but declined further comment.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2264 or tbeyerlein@DaytonDailyNews.com

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