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."
They weren't asked.
It's an alcoholic beverage. Time to change your story again?
Unsupported the first thousand times you made the assertion. Nothings changed, right?
Including some that aren't even there.
Those laws also encompassed regulations and restrictions.
You're just pretending to be that ignorant, aren't you?
Excuse tpaine rants. His/her all blow, no bloom posts on this thread further accentuate the hollow trite and immature 'contributions' he/she has sprinkled throughout FR threads.
Thanks for time and thought you've given to this particular thread.
Armed thugs wearing a badge are worse than those on the street. The badge exempts cold blooded murder. Witness the number of innocents brutally killed by accident in a mistaken police action. Police are reflective of the system they protect. The system is blatantly corrupt and traitorous toward the citizenry it is sworn to defend and protect. It necessarily follows they surround themselves with mindless thugs who are promoted and rewarded for the killing of innocent American and other nation men women and children, while money flows from all manner of crime syndicates to corrupted pretenders wearing the mantle of governance, justice, and law and order in America.
I'm sure you appreciate the obvious similarity between mad dog chowder head nincompoops, and donkeys. Before you tell them anything, you must whack them with a 2x4 to get their attention.
Because this venue eliminates that initial option, making use of logic is akin to throwing peals on pigs - it's mud and only mud they relish, not substantive dialogue.
If only there were a way to give the America of sixty years ago a read on the America of today.
God save America.
And you've deked and dodged and deflected. You're really not interested in having a discussion.
You're just pretending to be that ignorant, aren't you?
Do you really want me to go to the old thread and cut and paste your interpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion onto this thread so it will exist in two places?
And there's something about being emotionally involved in an issue that makes normally clear-headed conservatives join the liberals in their end-justifies-the-means disregard for constitutional limits on the power of the federal government.
How would you know? It's never been legalized, so you really can't say what effect it would have. Again, you decline to answer the question about murders during the Prohibtion.
Only one bone to pick with your otherwise yeoman's-work post. Prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act (1914), everything was legal at a federal level. Marijuana itself was unregulated at the federal level until the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
It was once legal, but it has never been legalized from an illegal condition. Hence, the effect on society that legalization would have is not something that has ever been tested here in this country. Therefore, those drug warriors who state "legalization is the most moronic thing I've ever heard of" quite affirmatively don't know what they're talking about, because it's never been done; they are just blowing anti-drug bigotry out of their backsides.
Alcohol, on the other hand, has been legalized in this way. As a result, drinking went down, organized crime went down, and gangster violence went down, but unfortunately organized crime had gotten a solid foothold, guns started getting controlled, and the corrupt Kennedy family had already gotten a foothold into politics - the price of which we are still paying today. I keep challenging Havoc to state his case on the crimes during the Prohibition, were they caused by alcohol in the same way that crimes today are "caused" by drugs - or instead by their prohibition, but he refuses to address the question.
The question isn't whether drug use should be justified, the question is whether their prohibition is worse than the drug use itself. Recall that this story is about a pothead who was killed by drug warriors. Pot doesn't kill people, even if it does scramble their brains. But drug warriors do kill people. How is that somehow better?
Do you think anyone has ever been killed by a druggie needing money to feed his habit?
Sure, and people kill one another for other reasons too: love, money, revenge, and so forth. Murder is bad, and all these murderers are imprisoned if not executed for their crimes. But unique among all these deaths is that drug warriors are not sanctioned when they kill people. Some get paid vacation, some get promoted, none ever face murder charges. So comparing an ordinary murder, for whatever reason, with drug warrior murders is idiotic.
But in any case, of the murders caused by druggies killing for cash, how much of that violence was because drug are illegal? I'll ask the same question of you that Havoc refuses to answer. During the Prohibition the murder rates were higher than after it was repealed. Those who were killed during in excess of the rate after - were they killed because of alcohol, or because of it's prohibition?
I think Jackson is pro-legalization, and that story is almost a daily event in some inner city black neighborhoods. Not long ago, we had to drive through a certain part of the city, past a section of "projects". There were two officers not in uniform patting down an elderly man, and, as we turned the corner, we saw another cop armed and wearing a bullet-proof vest on the outside of his clothing, just hiding around the corner building. It was a war zone, and people were just sitting on the front steps like it was just another day in the neighborhood. These raids happen so often in some areas that the stories don't even make the news.
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