A Clay Township man convicted in December 2023 for removing an engine from a rented minivan and replacing it with a nonrunning engine received a minor reduction in his sentence following an appeal.

Steven M. Ewida, 37, was resentenced Tuesday in Common Pleas Court in accordance with the resolution of his appeal of his original sentence. In response to his appeal, Superior Court found that two of the charges were incorrectly graded as felonies when they should have been less serious misdemeanors.

Ewida apologized for his angry outbursts during his trial and his attorney asked for a sentence of house arrest.

Assistant district attorney Robert Zanella asked for the original sentence to be reordered.

“The sentence was appropriate then and now,” he said.

Judge Maura Palumbi, who presided over Ewida’s jury trial, said she believed he is remorseful for his conduct during the trial, but saw no remorse from him for the crimes of which he was convicted.

Palumbi said the sentence she imposed in 2023 was at the bottom range of the sentencing guidelines and she left most of it intact.

She sentenced Ewida to six months to 23-and-a-half months in county prison followed by a total of 84 months of probation for his conviction on five charges filed in May 2020 by state police from the Western Region Auto Theft Task Force. He was taken into custody to be taken to prison after the hearing.

The length of the jail term and the overall length of the probation are the same as Palumbi imposed in 2023. The differences were a theft charge was reduced from a third-degree felony to a third-degree misdemeanor and a third-degree felony count of receiving stolen property was reduced to a third-degree misdemeanor. The sentences for both charges were reduced from 84 months of probation to 12 months.

However, Palumbi left the 84 month probation sentences unchanged for two other third-degree felony charges — altering or destroying a vehicle identification number and disposition of a vehicle or vehicle part with an altered vehicle identification number. The probation sentences run concurrently.

The jail sentence was ordered for Ewida’s conviction of owning, operating or conducting a chop shop, a second-degree felony. Included in the sentence were orders to pay $15,128 in restitution to Enterprise Rent-A-Car and to complete 40 hours of community service.

The co-owner of an East Butler fuel tank business testified in the December 2023 trial that he sold Ewida a 2016 Dodge Ram ProMaster 1500 van with “something blown in the engine” in February or March 2020 for $200.

Ewida rented a 2019 Dodge Caravan minivan on April 30, 2020, from Enterprise in Monroeville, but it didn’t run when he returned it in early May. Enterprise had the van towed to a Dodge dealership, which discovered the engine wasn’t the one the minivan was originally equipped with, and reported the missing engine stolen to Monroeville police, according to testimony.

The dealership service manager testified the serial number on the engine had been ground off, the engine and transmission were not mated together, the fuel line had been cut, radiator bolts were missing, the air conditioning condenser was not connected, an air conditioning line was cut, engine mounting bolts were missing, the crankshaft pulley belt was missing, there was no oil in the engine and an axle was not connected. But the vehicle identification number remain attached to the minivan, according to testimony.