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."
Bzzt, WRONG. Beer and wine could be made at home for personal use, but could NOT be manufactured for public consumption nor transported or sold.
A few references to that ..
Even when it is possible to make the distinction, it isn't made, and the entire premise relies on that distinction never being made.
Tell that to the thousands of people serving time for that very "offense"...
No, but this is anecdotal evidence. Notwithstanding your great aunt's experience, and that of perennial cigar smoker George Burns's, hundreds of thousands of people die each year of lung cancer, emphesyma, throat cancer, etc, who are smokers, in a way very disproportionate to non-smokers. On a similar note, there are huge numbers of anecdotal cases about drug users who don't steal, who don't harm others, and who don't mess up anyone's lives, including their own. But tobacco and alcohol are legal, and these other drugs aren't.
The exception to the rule is the small percentage of people that are harmed by comparison to the massive numbers of smokers around the world.
But even a small percentage is a lot of people when there are many millions of smokers. So my statement about more harm from tobacco compared to drug use still stands.
Sugar is a mind altering drug, let's ban it. NoT.
I don't advocate any prohibition - I don't even think tobacco should be banned. It's dangerous, and if you smoke it you might get cancer or some other lung disease. That's your choice and you are welcome to it. (Just don't make me pay for your health care.)
See there is a difference in many of these things. Too much coffee doesn't make people go rob their neighbors blind to maintain the habit. Nor does it cause people to rob banks or stick guns in the noses of gas station attendants to pay for the next dime bag.
Neither does pot ... though the prohibition might well accomplish this. People were murdered during the Prohibition, but the murder rate dropped when it was repealed. Were the deaths during the Prohibition because of alcohol, or because of the Prohibition? The fact that it dropped right after its repeal strongly implies the latter. And so it is with pot, and all the other drugs. Besides, pot is easy to grow. Why would people hold up gas stations for their next dime bag, if they could grow it without fear of being murdered by the police as in this case here? It's a weed, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to grow it.
Drugs are dangerous things.
So are guns, cars, ladders, bicycles, matches, and knives. Shall we ban them, and lock up each person in a padded cell "for their protection?" Or shall we decide to live in a free country and let people make choices, including dangerous choices, and live or die by their own decisions? I prefer the latter.
They destroy brain cells and cause what many lovingly call burnouts - people who have the thought capacity of the average butt splinter and the personality of a stunned cow - or worse.
Jackbooted SWAT thugs also destroy brain cells when they shoot people in the head - and sometimes they do this to people who weren't doing drugs at all, because they can't even write the correct number on their no-knock raid warrant. At least the druggies shoose for themselves to live as stunned cows. Those murdered by the jackbooted thugs didn't have that choice.
Drug addiction is not a little thing. Nor is it a harmless thing.
Neither is smoking, or being an alcoholic. Yet these things are legal, and drugs aren't. By the numbers the former are a lot more dangerous, so harm reduction clearly isn't the intention of the law.
And I can tell you from experience of seeing what it has done to friends and even an ex-girlfriend or two. I dated a meth addict for a while not realizing she was one at the start. It was a hidden thing. Her kids didn't have good meals and were lugged about from one home to the next for a long time before she ended up with me - all of which I found out after the fact. She sponged off of people, used and abused them and walked over anyone in her way. All her money went to meth. Her kids ate what I provided or struggled by on cheetos and cheerios when not in my company because she couldn't afford to take care of them and be high.
There are kids with this sorry fate whose parents are drinkers too, except that the children of alcoholics also tend to get beaten as well. Yet alcohol is legal and meth isn't.
Marijuana is not without it's problems either. And people who try to downplay it are liars at best. Drugs are bad news - and so are the people who take them. That's why they are illegal and should remain so.
Every argument you have made about pot can be made even more strongly about alcohol, yet the Prohibition of alcohol was a complete disaster with far-reaching negative consequences, including the establishment of the Mafia and of the Kennedy family in politics. The War on (some) Drugs is an even bigger disaster, in terms of expense, lives lost or destroyed, rights lost, and expansion of federal powers. Compared to the cost of having a few people decide they would rather be stunned cows, the drug war is incomprehensibly more destructive. And yet you support it.
Drowned out by the ringing emptiness between your ears, is it?
Should Google or Lexus-Nexus ever break down, surely you could substitute as a manual replacement until the software can be repaired. But pertinency is definitely a challenge for you.
Most certainly not.
In 1919 supporters of prohibition outnumbered opponents. In 1933 they did not.
Not very hard to understand.
Source?
That's your assertion. Where's your support?
Oh? What about Steve Kubby?
No source, of course.
That didn't make beer and wine legal per se. That only allowed individuals to home brew for personal consumption and exempted the Church in order to continue to allow the use of wine in the Sacrament of Communion.
Sort of like the "medicinal marijuana" exemptions for California residents that the US government has such a hard time with...
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