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."
Paradoxically, he's a big fan of "pennumbras and emmanations" extending the reach of the FedGov beyond its Constitutional boundries through judicial activism.
How very California Democrat of him.
Which assertion was that?
How do I feel about it? Or what do I think.
How about if I give you personal experience as an example of what I think. One of the guys I went to school with endo'd his car 5 times into a local cemetary. He wasn't wearing his seatbelt and because of that, was thrown to the floorboards and survived. The roof of the car was caved in flat to the body line of the car. He would have died had his belt been on. And even the Police said so. That was before the law. Seven years ago, my Aunt was coming home on a winter day driving her truck down the bypass in bad weather. My uncle was in his car right behind her. She hit a patch of ice in the road and lost control of the vehicle. The truck rolled and she was thrown part way out of the window - before the vehicle landed on it's roof and literally cut her in half. My uncle saw it happen right in front of him and could do nothing. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt. We all still miss her - the entire town. She was well and widely known, loved and respected and her funeral was massive. If she'd been wearing a seatbelt, she might have survived but the chances are slim. Long and short of it is that it's at best a 50/50 bet. Sometimes they'll save you and sometimes they'll seal your fate. There is no way to predict when it will be either. And therefore, their requirement is bad law. Helmets for motorcycles are the same. The majority of helmets in accidents exceeding 50mph will Kill you on impact. The only difference they make is open or closed casket. And this can be understood quite easily. Your neck can handle 2 g's of pressure. A helmet will take 3. The helmet will bounce where your head will not, thus putting a reflexive 3 g's force to your neck - snapping it. Death or vegetablised. On low spead impacts they can help you. I haven't personally seen too many low speed impacts with bikes. And this state does't have a helmet law, though it does have a seatbelt law. Then again the state is run by dems but votes pubby nationally quite reliably. Go figure.
CSA. Substantial and direct. Splat.
Since when. Our representatives are not sent up their to be mere puppets. They are their to serve the people, the interests of justice, the constitution and the best interests of our nation. You're addiction induced cravings aren't a reason for us to do away with intelligent legislation that is in the best interests of this country. If you want to crawl around in the gutter sucking doob like a moron, go find one of those uncivilized french speaking countries and stop trying to drag ours down to their level.
To a complete falsehood. Sourceless naturally.
"The common law of England, including its prohibition of sodomy, became the received law of Georgia and the other Colonies." -- BOWERS v. HARDWICK, 478 U.S. 186 (1986)
Criminy, tpaine, are you ever right about anything?
Constitution - 1789. Founding Father who said smoking dope was a Constitutional right - nada.
Sorry to hear about your neighbor, but the available research shows that the the vast majority of marijuana users do not go on to harder drugs. Even the federal government's own research has disproven the "gateway drug" arguement. I realize you work with the worst-case scenarios, but if you insist on characterizing those cases as the general rule with respect to the results of marijuana use, then you are no more objective on the subject than Sarah Brady is on the subject of gun control.
When you talk about the seat belt issue, you make a conscious distinction between talking about what you think about it and talking about how you feel about it. You see both sides of the issue and present objective, reasoned observations. I get no sense of that kind of objectivity in your posts about drugs and the drug war.
How quickly you forget.
"The whole authority of the CSA is predicated on a New Deal interpretation of what constitutes interstate commerce---NOTHING ELSE." -- Hemingway's Ghost
Still waiting for even a shred of support.
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