According to Dayton Police Lt. Mark Ponichtera, at around 1:30 p.m., a detective spotted a person wanted on charges of gross abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence connected to a 2023 death that was ruled a homicide.
The lieutenant said the detective tried to gather other police units, and after a uniformed officer arrived they confronted the man.
The man rammed an unmarked police vehicle with a car to get away from officers, Ponichtera said, but soon after bailed out of the car near a Sunoco gas station on Free Pike.
A brief foot chase followed, with officers pursuing the man to the apartment building at 2765 Wentworth Ave., near the intersection of Salem and West Siebenthaler avenues.
The lieutenant said that the complex usually requires a key card or someone inside buzzing the door open to access, but said that doors may be left ajar, which seems to be how he, and officers after him, gained access.
Ponichtera said that at first police did not know where the man was in the building. Many police units called were called he said, because the large-scale apartment building needed a large-scale police response. Police also closed the parking lot due to a “line of sight” issue.
Many officers had long guns out. At least one Dayton K-9 team also responded to help track the wanted man.
Eventually, though, the lieutenant said that they determined the man was in an apartment on the fifth floor. He said that due to the design of the apartments, “He was either coming out the window or he was coming out the door.”
Police contacted the resident of that unit and found that the tenant, who was not home, knew the suspect but did not know whether the suspect was still inside.
A SWAT team arrived shortly before 5 p.m., more than three hours after the Dayton Police Department responded and shut down Wentworth Avenue.
Ponichtera said a negotiation team also was called, and at some point during the pursuit and search a signal 99, or call for an officer in need of assistance, was issued, leading to crews from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office to respond as well.
The suspect did not respond to police attempts to contact him, and soon before 7 p.m. police entered the apartment using a robot from the Dayton Bomb Squad.
Ponichtera said the suspect surrendered peacefully and despite the large disturbance to the residents of the building there were no injuries. The unmarked police car that was rammed was damaged but the detective driving it was not hurt, he said.
Yolanda Ward who lives nearby was among many people waiting outside the nearby McDonald’s to find out what was happening and make sure her brother who lives in the building is OK.
“I haven’t heard anything from my brother,” she said. “He’s kind of sick so I don’t know if he got out.”
Another man outside the fast-food restaurant who did not give his name said he saw how the incident began.
He said a man was sitting in a vehicle at the adjacent BP gas station when Dayton police told him to get out and tried to block him in. The man’s car and a cruiser crashed and the man kept going.
Police dash camera and body camera video footage shows that a uniform officer approached the man with his gun drawn at the Sunoco lot, but that the man did not comply with commands to get out of the car and kept driving toward Wentworth Avenue before running to the apartments.
In addition to the charges, Ponichtera said that the man was a person of interest in the homicide that his charges were connected to.
He said that the death occurred on Richmond Avenue in 2023, and the prosecutor’s office initially turned down charges for the suspect and asked for further investigation, and that recently the man was indicted by a grand jury on the abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence charges.
The lieutenant did not identify the suspect in the pursuit. However, James Ernest Hancock, 49, was indicted earlier this week on two counts of tampering with evidence and one of gross abuse of a corpse connected to the death of 36-year-old Matthew Thomas in November 2023.
Thomas was pronounced dead on Nov. 1 after a 911 caller reported seeing two men apparently putting a dead body wrapped in a tarp in a truck bed at an apartment in the first block of Richmond Avenue.
Police said that the death was later determined to be a homicide.
As part of the investigation, the Dayton Police Homicide Unit was seeking an older model red and white Ford pickup truck. It is not clear what make, year or model the suspect’s vehicle involved in Friday’s pursuit was.
