Division I regional track finals
Fenwick graduation 2012
Ponitz graduation 2012
Home > Blogs > Dayton area crime > Archives > 2010 > June
June 2010
Police use Taser on man found sleeping in back yard
Police responded to the 1300 block of Swisher around 10:15 Saturday morning on a report of a man down.
They found Jeffrey Beans snoring away in the back yard of a vacant building. After several attempts, they were able to rouse him. He did not wake up a happy camper.
The 26-year-old man, once awake, began threatening the two officers. As the officers attempted to calm the man, a tussle ensued. It ended when one officer used a Taser on the man. Beans “immediately stopped fighting,” according to the police report. Police also reported a strong odor of alcohol emitting from Beans.
Escorted to the cruiser, Beans again became belligerent, thrashing around and spitting in an officer’s face. Again, an officer used a Taser Beans, and again Beans became compliant. Though all through his trip to the hospital to check him for any injuries, he cursed out officers. At the hospital, his behavior did not improve as he was uncooperative with doctors and staff.
He was taken to the county lockup. On his booking sheet, it was noted he had a tattoo across his stomach reading, “I Can Handle My Enemies.”
Monday, Beans was charged with felony assault of a police officer.
Beans was convicted in 2002 of aggravated robbery, assault and carrying a concealed weapon. He was sentenced to six years in prison, including a mandatory three-year term for carrying a weapon. Besides the latest charges, Beans is under an April grand jury indictment on several weapons charges.
TweetKroger employee hit with a bag of stolen steaks
A 43-year-old woman is in the county lockup after witnesses said she stole more than $100 in steaks from the Kroger on Smithville Road.
Witnesses also told police Wednesday, June 23, Gigi Jhair hit a Kroger employee upside the head with the steak-filled bag when stopped outside the grocery.
Police were called to the grocery around 6:30 p.m. by an off-duty officer acting as a security guard at the grocery. According to witnesses, Jhair took a reusable shopping bag off a display, tore off the price tag, filled the bag with three ribeye steaks and walked out the door. An employee, alerted by a customer, followed the woman out the store and confronted her in the parking lot.
The employee asked Jhair if she had a receipt for her “purchases.” According to the employee, JHair said her husband, seated in a car across the street, had the receipt. The employee suggested she hold the bag while Jhair got the receipt from her husband.
It was then, the employee said, Jhair swung the bag at her, hitting her on the left side of the face. The employee was able to grab and hang onto the bag. Jhair then walked away.
The off-duty officer came out of the grocery and began to follow Jhair on foot, all the while updating police by cell phone on Jhair’s location. The off-duty officer saw the woman appear to ask for a ride from cars at the drive thru at a nearby fast food restaurant. When police arrived, Jhair had gotten into one of the cars in the drive-thru line.
She was removed from the car and her purse searched. There, officers found three more steaks and what appeared to be a crack pipe. Throughout the questioning, Jhair refused to provide police with her name and began screaming obscenities at them, according to the police report.
She was arrested and taken to the county lockup for identification. Once her identity was established, police uncovered eight outstanding warrants for her, ranging from a theft charge in Trotwood, assault and domestic violence cases in Dayton and a raft of traffic warrants.
Prosecutors charged her Thursday in Dayton Municipal Court with felony robbery. The six steaks totaled $103.
Jhair also has a crack cocaine possession conviction from 2005.
TweetMen arrested for allegedly stealing picnic table frames
It appears a citizen may have saved Dayton taxpayers $700.
A man on Tuesday, June 22, flagged down police near Belmont Park. He’d seen two fellows loading metal picnic table frames into the back of a pickup at the park.
A regular park user, the man told police he’d been told the frames were to repair picnic tables in the Belmont neighborhood park. Curious, he’d approach the two men who told him a “man in a yellow vest” had told them the metal frames were free for the taking.
That didn’t make any sense to the man, who jotted down the truck’s license plate number as it drove off with seven of the frames. Then he went looking for police.
While officers were taking the information and running the plate, they heard a broadcast for crews to respond to a local scrap yard. An employee there was suspicious of two men trying to sell metal picnic table frames for scrap.
The officers contacted the city and discovered that no one had permission to take the frames and passed on the information to crews at the scrap yard.
At the scrap yard, the two men were arrested and taken to the county lockup. The frames were valued at $100 a pop, or a total of $700.
TweetPolice raid suspected drug house on Lexington
Police raided a suspected drug house in the 700 block of Lexington in the Southern Dayton View neighborhood Monday, June 21.
Police recovered suspected crack cocaine, a .40-caliber handgun and more than $2,000 in cash, and arrested the resident.
Police needed to break down a metal security door and the inside wooden door to enter the residence when no one responded to knocks and an orders over a bullhorn to open the door. Detectives found 38-year-old Dustin E. Russell in an upstairs bedroom, laying fully clothed on top of a bed.
Police got a search warrant for the house after a tip, days of surveillance and drug buys.
Russell told police he was the only one in the house, and when asked if what appeared to be crack cocaine found in the house was his, Russell said, “I don’t know anything about that.”
Detectives uncovered 10.2 grams of suspected cocaine in the house. They found $2,000 in a dresser drawer and additional $116 in Russell’s pocket. Also seized was a .40-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun with 14 rounds in the magazine, and a second magazine also loaded with 14 rounds.
Russell was taken to the county lockup, where he faces possible felony charges when he appears in court Wednesday.
Russell was indicted in 1998 on three counts of cocaine trafficking. He pleaded guilty to one count in January 1999 and later placed on five years probation. The court ended the probation in July 2001, concluding Russell was “rehabilitated to the extent that the community control period should be terminated,” according to court records.
TweetTwo women accused of aggravated robbery
A nice bit of police work has two women in the county lockup on aggravated robbery charges.
Police were called to the 400 block of South Jersey in the Burkhardt neighborhood around 6:40 Sunday evening on a report of an attempted stickup.
Four men were in the back yard of the house, and told police they were drinking beer. Two women walked through the alley, and one of the men, knowing one of the women, asked if they’d like a beer. The women chatted with the men and the conversation turned to money, which made the men uncomfortable.
When one of the men went inside to get the women a beer, one of the women said to the other, “Do it.” That’s when the second woman pulled a .380 semiautomatic pistol from her shorts and held to the head of one of the men.
The man wrestled with the pistol-toting woman. The second woman tried to intervene, but a second man grabbed her. The two women were able to escape empty handed without their pistol. One also dropped her cell phone. Police would later determine the pistol had one round in the chamber and four rounds in the magazine.
When police arrived, one victim said one of the women was named Veronica. A second said he knew where she had lived, but had moved. Police went to the former residence with no success. An officer contacted dispatch to see if there were any calls for assistance from that address. Veronica Melton and her boyfriend had called police several times on domestic problems. In one call from the boyfriend, he left his phone number.
Police called the boyfriend, who said he had broken up with Melton, and she had a new boyfriend whom he suspected of dealing drugs. The ex-boyfriend gave police Melton’s date of birth. With that information, police were able to run down the new boyfriend. They already knew his address.
Arriving there, police found the new boyfriend outside the apartment. He said he had just arrived and did not know if anyone was in the apartment. He gave police permission to enter to apartment, where they found several people. When asked where Veronica was, police were directed to a locked bathroom.
Pounding on the door, police were able to get Melton and a second woman, Vanessa Bowling, to come out. They were handcuffed, taken back to the Jersey address, identified by the victims and booked into the county lockup.
According to police, Bowling, 24, had been talking to the 35-year-old Melton about her money problems. Melton told Bowling she knew two men they could rob. Bowling dropped off her child with a friend and joined up with Melton. Melton had a pistol she said he got from her boyfriend and gave it to Bowling to hide in her shorts.
The robbery went down as the victim’s described.
Melton protested she should not be arrested because she was not the one with the gun. When she saw one of the officers holding the cell phone left at the scene, she asked if she could get her cell phone back. She was told it was evidence, and she would have to do without.
Charges were filed against the pair this morning.
TweetWomen duke it out at McIntosh Park
Five women were arrested — two of them juveniles — for rioting Saturday, June 19, at W.S. McIntosh Memorial Park after the Juneteenth Celebration at the park on Riverview.
Police reported more than 200 people gathered around 7:30 p.m. at the south end of the park as a group of six females squared off, egged on by the crowd. The four officers at the park were able to break up the initial melee, but other fights broke out.
Officers called for more help, and units from throughout the city, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, Trotwood, West Carrollton, Sinclair Community College and MetroParks responded with lights and sirens.
Police quickly sorted out the situation, arresting a 21-year-old, an 18-year-old, a 19-year-old and the two juveniles. All were taken to the county lockup or juvenile jail and booked in on misdemeanors. Injuries were described as minor.
Chattered on the Internet last week indicated a group of females were planning to settle their differences at the park.
TweetA woman and her baseball bat on a mission
The purported victim had a mission in mind when she called police, a mission of which police wanted no part.
Officers were called for a second time around 8:30 Thursday night, June 17, to the first block of Illinois Avenue in the Twin Towers neighborhood near the University of Dayton.
On the first call, the 43-year-old woman told officers her boyfriend had frightened her with his yelling, and she wanted them to respond so he would leave. The boyfriend was not there when police arrived.
On the second call, 30 minutes later, she told officers she had lied and that her boyfriend had pushed and slapped her around.
In addition, she wanted criminal vandalism charges filed against the man. In the intervening 30 minutes, she said she discovered the boyfriend had poured beer over her computer prior to the first call.
As officers were attempting to get more information on the boyfriend, the woman became more and more adamant on what she wanted from police. She and her baseball bat were going to get in the back seat of the police cruiser, and she was going to direct the officers through the neighborhood until they found the boyfriend.
All of this so that once the boyfriend was found, “she could get out and bash his head in with the bat,” according to the officers’ report.
Both officers, time and again, informed the woman that was not going to happen. They tried to get her to focus on giving them the boyfriend’s information so he could be found. She continued to persist on her planned course of action.
Officers continued their persuasion that her best course of action was to remain in her apartment “until …. she had sobered up.”
When it finally dawned on the woman that police were not going to take her boyfriend hunting, she told the officers, “Well, then you might as well erase everything that I just told you because that’s the only thing I have an interest in,” according to the officers’ report.
Unable to get a description or any information on the boyfriend and given the woman’s lack of cooperation, police cleared the scene.
TweetWhy must parents and grandparents bury children?
Charles Landers spent a sleepless night, pondering the wrongness of parents and grandparents burying their children.
His 15-year-old step-granddaughter, Ronika Owens-Clemons, died Wednesday night, June 16, at Miami Valley Hospital from a gunshot wound. Police have arrested a 16-year-old boy, who was booked in to the juvenile jail on homicide.
“We shouldn’t be burying our kids,” he said Thursday morning, sitting in the front room of his small, tidy house on Orchard Avenue. “They should be burying us.”
An ordained minister, Landers officiated the funeral Monday of his wife’s sister. “She had lived a long life, and it was a celebration of that life.
“But Ronika was just a baby. She didn’t even have a chance to go to her senior prom. I’m not sure I can do that service.”
Landers was in the delivery room when Ronika was born, and smiled and laughed when remembering his granddaughter’s many visits to the home. “I’d always pick on her, and she’d always say something like, ‘Grandma, come get this old man’.
“She always called me old man,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “And I’d tell her, ‘Girl, you keep on living, and you’ll be old some day.’”
Landers’ face went blank and silence filled the room.
“What is a 16-year-old doing with a gun in a public park,” Landers finally said. “It’s like a bad dream. … There needs to be something done about these kids and these guns. It was a freak accident and it could have been prevented.”
Ronika, the youngest of Kim Clemons’ six children, went Wednesday to the Westwood Park as she often did with her 16-year-old sister, Kikki, to play basketball. Landers said Kikki was the basketball player and Ronika was Kikki’s biggest cheerleader.
Landers, his wife Teresa and one of his sons were chatting in the front room of the Orchard Avenue home when the call came late Wednesday afternoon. It was one of Teresa’s daughters saying Ronika had been shot. The call froze the two men.
“I thought, ‘I did not hear that’,” Landers said. He and his wife piled into their car and drove to the park. When they got there, Ronika was already in the ambulance, and police were questioning witnesses. Landers said he heard it was an accident; that the young man had been around the park all day, showing off a handgun. He was told there was some type of confrontation; that the young man tried to pull the weapon from his pocket; that the weapon discharged, striking Ronika, who was standing beside him.
His wife went to the hospital with Ronika’s mother, and Landers went back to Orchard Avenue to handle phone calls. Forty-five minutes later, the call came from the hospital.
“All I heard was screaming,” he said. “Then Teresa got on and said Ronika was dead.”
After a night of searching for answers, Landers said he has forgiven the young man. “We have to pray for him and his family. Young kids don’t understand that. You have to forgive. You have to.”
TweetDamaged ATM, stolen meat, Mad Dog lead to man’s arrest
Over the space of 30 minutes Saturday morning, June 12, a 35-year-old man apparently took out an ATM with a baseball-sized rock; shop-lifted several packages of meat and a jug of Mad Dog 20/20 — orange-flavored — and was stopped rolling a stainless steel CO2 tank away from a restaurant.
In two of the alleged criminal enterprises, Dayton police have video evidence.
The first piece of evidence was the video from the ATM at the Universal One Credit Union at 2933 Harshman. Police were called around 11 a.m. after bank personnel were told their ATM in the shopping center parking lot was busted. The machine’s screen was shattered and laying beside the broken machine was the above-described rock.
While the screen may have been busted, the machine’s camera was not. Reviewing the tape, a man — later identified as Brian Horst of Riverside — rides up to the ATM at 5:30 a.m. on his white bike. First, he opens his wallet. Then he is seen yelling at the machine, talking to the machine then pressing his face up to the machine numerous times.
Unable, perhaps, to communicate with the ATM, the man is last seen walking away from the it, making a pitching motion with his arm, then finally riding off on his bike.
Horst is next seen by police around 6 a.m. pushing the above-described stainless-steel tank down Interpoint Boulevard. That officer was able to follow a trail of packages of meat and the above-described booze Horst was dropping while rolling the tank.
The officer questioned Horst as to why he may have stolen the tank. Horst responded he didn’t steal a thing. It was just laying there — wherever there was — as if it were trash, and he was simply rolling it closer to a trash can.
The officer handcuffed Horst and asked another officer for assistance. That officer quickly ascertained the meat and the Mad Dog had come from a nearby Kroger. A review of the store security tape clearly showed Horst slipping the Mad Dog under his shirt. Horst would later claim someone had purchased the meat and Mad Dog for him with food stamps. It should be noted one cannot by alcohol with food stamps.
He was taken to the county lockup and booked.
When the officer who handled the ATM complaint returned to the station later in the day, she was informed that her suspect was now in the county jail for his later alleged misdeeds.
Horst was to be arraigned Monday afternoon on misdemeanor petty theft and criminal trespassing.
TweetPerry Twp. police nab 22-year-old wanting sex from a 15-year-old
Montgomery County prosecutors this afternoon, June 11, filed felony importuning charges against a 22-year-old New Lebanon man for attempting to arrange to have sex with a 15-year-old girl.
According to Perry Twp. Police Chief Bob Bowman, local officers with the assistance of the RANGE task force set up a sting June 10 and arrested Andrew Michael Meade at a township park.
Bowman said police earlier were contacted by school officials and a mother, all of whom shared the suspicion that an adult was targeting students through MySpace accounts and text messages. Yesterday, the mother called to say that person was again texting her daughter. With the family’s permission, a township officer impersonated the 15-year-old.
A meeting was set up for later that day at the park. Bowman said Meade “was very explicit in what he wanted to do” and clearly understood the child was 15.
But instead of a 15-year-old, Meade was met and arrested by a female township officers and a number of colleagues from the task force.
Bowman said the arrest comes just a week after Joseph Cummings of New Lebanon was sentenced to prison for five and one-half years for luring 13- to 16-year-old girls for sex.
TweetAn interesting response to a dismissal
The security guard got interested Thursday, June 10, when he saw a man with computer paper in hand go to the side of a downtown building on West First Street.
A group of students was gathered as the man placed three sheets of computer paper on the building’s wall. Each sheet contained a pornographic image of various activities, best left to the reader’s imagination.
When police arrived, the man said he saw nothing wrong with what he was doing. Afterall, he told police, he was in the midst of a disagreement with a school housed in the building. The school had apparently dismissed him from one of its program.
The man was given a ride to the county lockup to await a decision on formal charges.
TweetMom IDs son in case of elderly woman’s stolen credit card
Prosecutors are expected to file felony aggravated burglary charges this afternoon, June 11, against a Celina man who allegedly duped an elderly Dayton woman last weekend.
Brandon Lykins, 22, returned yesterday to the woman’s home on Fieldstone to attempt to explain his earlier actions, according to Detective Bill Myers. The woman would have none of that and yelled for help. As Lykins fled, neighbors came running and held the man until police arrived.
Myers said police were already closing in on Lykins with the help of the public — including Lykins’ mother. Police had ATM videos from four or five sites showing Lykins using the woman’s ATM card. Those videos were broadcast on WHIO-TV, which prompted a number of calls.
“We got six from the Celina area that identified the man, and his mother also called to say that was her son,” Myers said.
Saturday, June 5, the elderly woman answered her front door. The woman thought the young man on the stoop was a neighbor’s son, who had once fixed her vacuum. She invited the young man in, chatted with him, gave him $20 for gas and offered to make him a sandwich. While she was fixing the sandwich, the young man said he would wash up. Instead, he went into her bedroom where he took a credit card and debit card.
Rather than sit down and eat the sandwich, the young man said he was going to get gas and would be right back. He never returned.
When the woman later found her cards missing she called a neighbor, who called police and got a list of transactions on the cards.
That same neighbor on Thursday heard the woman call for help and chased down Lykins, keeping him corner until police arrived.
“There will be more charges presented to the grand jury,” Detective Myers said.
TweetGroup beats grandfather, officers say
A 58-year-old grandfather approached a group of young people to talk to them about their harassment of his grandsons.
It did not go well. The grandfather was taken to the hospital, and two adults and two juveniles were taken to jail.
When police arrived in the 1800 block of Linnbrook in the Greenwich Village neighborhood around 8:45 p.m. Thursday, June 3, they found the victim badly beaten and confused. The beating apparently occurred some four hours earlier.
The victim was able to tell police he was “sick of boys down the street messing with his grandsons” and had gone to say something to them about it. The victim’s daughter said she was at work when the beating occurred, but she came home after she got a phone call telling her of it. She found her father bleeding and confused, and called police.
One grandson told police it all started when his 8-year-old brother came home crying after being pushed off his bike and beaten by two other 8-year-olds. The 14-year-old grandson said he and his grandfather drove to nearby Kings Highway to talk with the boys.
When the grandfather saw the two 8-year-olds, he stopped to talk with them. A group of people gathered to watch. The grandson said he saw one of the boys knock a cell phone out of his grandfather’s hand and as the man stooped to pick it up, several people knocked him to the ground, kicking and punching him while he was down.
The grandson said he threw himself on his grandfather to protect him and was able to get him off the ground and back to the truck, which the grandfather drove home.
Police had four hours earlier responded to Kings Highway on report from Yulonda Brown that the grandfather had struck one of her sons in the face. The son was not present, and police said the 37-year-old woman gave contradictory stories and incomplete information.
Now they returned to Kings Highway and arrested Brown and 19-year-old Daniel Michael Turner, along with two juveniles. The two youngsters told police of the beating, identifying Brown and Turner as among the attackers.
The juveniles were fingerprinted and taken to the Family County Center. Brown and Turner are in the county lockup.
The grandfather is expected to recover.
TweetDrama escalates to severe road rash
When Dayton police arrived Sunday, May 30, in the 600 block of Smithville around 4:15 p.m., they found a 20-year-old woman laying in the road, screaming in pain.
Officers described the victim as having “extreme road rash” over most of her body, including all the skin frayed from her heels and what appeared to be burn marks.
Witnesses told police the victim had been grabbed by the driver of a car, which took off dragging the young woman about half-a-block to Smithville. The victim was rushed to the hospital and police began searching for 22-year-old Alexandria Lewis and 31-year-old Shane Skipper.
The two were quickly spotted at a house on Springfield. After backup was called, the two surrendered to police.
One witness said she saw Lewis reach out the driver’s window, grab the victim’s shirt and take off down the street with Skipper steering. The witness said she saw Lewis let go of the victim who fell to the pavement and was run over by one of the car’s wheels.
Lewis said the victim came up to her car and punched her through the open driver’s window. Lewis said the car was in drive and she could not shift into park so she started driving away. When asked why she didn’t stop when she saw the victim was in distress, Lewis responded, “Because she was trying to hurt me.”
At the hospital, the victim said she and Lewis had once been friends and the victim “wanted the drama to stop.” When she approached the car, Lewis grabbed her shirt and took off. The victim said she blacked out.
Doctors said the victim had severe road rash over most of her body and fractured facial bones.
Lewis and Skipper were taken to the Montgomery County Jail. Both have been charged with felonious assault. Skipper is being held on $50,000 bond and Lewis on $25,000.
TweetPolice chief’s car, garage burglarized
DAYTON — City police officers are searching for someone who broke into Chief Richard Biehl’s home and car early Saturday morning, May 29.
Officers responded to Biehl’s home in a neighborhood east of Harshman Road and Brandt Pike at 9:20 p.m. Sunday, nearly 48 hours after the burglary happened, and took the burglary report.
Biehl told the officers the thief must have opened the attached garage some time between 1:50 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. from an unlocked 2004 Honda Accord parked near the home, the report stated.
A GPS unit was taken from the Accord, along with electric drills, tools, soccer equipment and knives from the garage.Neighbors reported seeing nothing during the time of the burglary, the report stated.
It is unclear if Biehl was home at the time of the burglary.
Biehl was in a meeting Tuesday afternoon and was not immediately available for comment.
Anyone with information about the burglary is urged to call 333-COPS.
Tweet
