Posted on 10/01/2002 7:16:59 AM PDT by Phantom Lord
Dozens protest Preble County police shooting
Slain man’s roommates say he was unarmed
EATON | Preble County law-enforcement officials declined to talk publicly Monday as they turned information about Friday's fatal shooting by a police officer of a 23-year-old man over to detectives from the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office.
Montgomery County investigators, called in by Preble County Sheriff Tom Hayes, also said they would not talk about their review of the shooting by a member of a Preble County's emergency services group — officers from a number of police departments who are trained to handle drownings and hostage and other situations.
However, it was anything but quiet outside the Preble County Courthouse, where dozens of friends and relatives picketed and said that police were covering up what happened to Clayton Jacob Helriggle, 23, of 1282 Ohio 503 South.
The protesters disputed police claims that Helriggle had a gun when he descended a stairwell and was shot by a Lewisburg police officer, whose identity has not been released. Friends and relatives on Monday carried blue plastic cups similar to the one they said Helriggle had in his hand Friday night.
Among the protesters were four of Helriggle's roommates, three of whom said they were inside the brick farmhouse when police stormed the house to serve a warrant to search for narcotics.
Maj. Wayne Simpson of the Preble County Sheriff's Office declined to discuss information about what happened Friday night and said a report on the shooting of the Preble County man had not been completed. Preble County Prosecutor Rebecca Ferguson said she sealed the search warrant after the shooting, and had no comment regarding the investigation.
"They're a professional group of officers, that's what their job is, and I'm not going to second-guess them. Whatever (Montgomery County officials) come up with, they come up with," Ferguson said.
Friends called Helriggle "peaceful and nonviolent," but police said the 1997 Twin Valley South High School graduate held a 9 mm handgun, not a blue cup, in his right hand when he descended the dimly lighted stairs. Roommates said Helriggle owned a 9 mm gun, but that it was upstairs when police entered their house.
"It's like we were armed, hardened criminals waiting inside to take them on," said Wes Bradley, 26, who lived in the bottom of the six-bedroom farmhouse with his girlfriend, 22-year-old Tasha Webster.
Bradley said he and Webster were near the kitchen next to the stairs, when officers "broke through the back door with battering rams and started throwing in flash grenades three at a time, to blind us."
The officers wore full body armor and carried shields, he said.
Another roommate, Ian Albert, said he had returned home from the grocery store with Chris Elmore, 24, who remained outside while Albert ran into the house.
"We saw at least two paddy wagon-type vehicles, like a SWAT bus," Elmore said. "About 30 officers stormed out of the woods" surrounding the farmhouse. "They'd cut the barbed wire, and you could see a staging area, like where 25 to 30 uniformed cops had been lying down and slithered along the grass."
Officers ordered Elmore to get on the ground, and he said he heard three pops, which he said could have been the flash grenades and gunshot.
"I yelled 'Nobody's armed,' and they told me, 'Shut up, shut up.' ”
Elmore described the action "like a movie, in slow motion."
Inside, Albert said, the police threw him against the staircase, "with my head on the second step up. I wanted to yell at Clay, but I looked up and saw him, rounding the stairway, and he had this look on his face, like, 'What's going on?' and the cops yelled, 'Get down' and then 'boom.' ”
Albert, who completed four months of Navy Seal training, said he reached up for Helriggle, "and I tried to apply pressure," he said, placing his left palm on his right chest, where Helriggle was struck by the gunshot.
"He died in my arms," he said. "It took about two minutes."
Albert said he was placed in a sheriff's car, and Helriggle's parents arrived.
"They saw me, drenched in Clay's blood, and they ask me, 'Is he all right?' and I just shook my head. The cops are smoking and joking, high-fiving each other. Wow, I think, they took down a farm of unarmed hippies.
"If they would have come to the door and said, 'Give us your dope, hippies,' we'd have gotten about a $100 ticket."
Police said they confiscated a small amount of marijuana, pills, drug paraphernalia and quantities of packaging items used in the distribution of marijuana.
The four roommates said they smoke marijuana from time to time and that they had marijuana pipes in the house. Bradley said he had a prescription for Fiorocet, a codeinelike painkiller, for a bad knee. They said the packaging police referred to was a box of plastic sandwich bags.
Webster said there was nothing in the house "that a good divorce lawyer couldn't have gotten us out on a misdemeanor," and said an old shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle found there were used for hunting.
"We target-practiced outside all the time, shot at bales of hay, jugs, that sort of thing," Webster said.
Bradley and Webster said Helriggle took a nap around 5 p.m. and had made plans to meet his girlfriend later.
"I'm not sure if he woke up from the bashing on the door or what," Bradley said.
All four said they were not read their rights or told what charges were filed against them. They were released from the Preble County Jail around 1:30 a.m. Saturday. No criminal charges have been filed.
Nancy Fahrenholz, the daughter of Everett "Bill" Fahrenholz, an attorney and former country prosecutor, hugged Bradley on Monday at the courthouse. Helriggle and five roommates rented the house from the Fahrenholzes.
"I'm so sorry," said Fahrenholz, a Rhode Island resident in the area to finish up the estate of her father, Bill Fahrenholz, who died a month ago.
"(Dad) would have been furious at this," she said. "We're all very distressed."
She said Helriggle "was a really nice guy," and that her family was pleased with the five young people's work on rehabilitating the farmhouse.
Helriggle's 77-year-old grandfather, Donald, a Miamisburg resident and Ohio Bell retiree, said his grandson rented the farmhouse "so they could play their instruments, listen to their music and drink a little beer. . . . They just wanted to be doing what 23-year-olds do."
Roscoe started that childishness? Tsk, tsk.
And a meteor can also come crashing through my roof at any moment, night or day.
But it isn't something I get overly paranoid about.
I'm afraid that, even as a hard-core Buchananite, my profile is just too plain normally dull for that kind of excitement.
Nor any large amounts of cash, or stolen property - you have to wonder what kind of evidence they had to support the assertion that it was a drug dealing operation.
How looney.
His unarmed pothead buddies weren't killed.
Don't be so sure of yourself. You've obviously never seen the LONG list of dead innocent people who weren't involved with drugs, didn't overreact, yet were shot by police.
You DO remember that kid that was shot in his car in front of his girlfriend by FBI for no reason, don't you? You HAVE heard of that 10 year old Modesto, CA boy who was blasted in the back with a shotgun by a cop because the cop's finger "slipped", haven't you? And that wasn't the first "accident" that this same cop had, he had killed a least one other innocent person on an earlier raid...
Another advantage of not having my thinking clouded by drug use.
NONE of the people I've mentioned above had their thinking "clouded" by drug use. In fact, the list of police homicide victims is filled with elderly couples and innocent others.
No, the cops didn't say that, the kids did.
They obviously used the same logic at Waco...
The only "risk" here is that posed by the cops themselves.
Not that anyone ever accused you of ever pushing the mental envelope Kev, but the foundations of our laws are based upon ILLEGALIZING. We are free and every law after that prohibits us. There are no laws legalizing anything. Even alcohol wasn’t legalized, the prohibition was repealed.
Kev, drugs and such wear off, but stupidity is forever. You could be next.
When they came for the dopers,
I did nothing, because I didn’t smoke.
When they came for the gun owners,
I did nothing because I didn’t own.
When they came for the stupid,
They came for me.
And no one was left to save me.
Kevin Curry.
Cowboys are professionals.
Otherwise, Yah! What you said.
Mean while, as this young guy lays dead, thousands of trucks with unknown loads are crossing our borders every day, as the titanic invasion of millions of illegal aliens continue to trample our borders, our laws and our sovereignty.
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