Official, brother arrested in 2006 homicide
A former Logan County man who for two decades kept authorities in several Ohio counties busy chasing his prolific vehicle-theft ring and chop-shop operation was arrested on Monday in Florida in a cold-case murder in northeastern Ohio, multiple sources have told The Dispatch.
Following a years-long investigation that ramped up with tips and new leads only in the past few months, federal marshals arrested Joe Rosebrook, 59, in Florida and his brother, 57year-old Jeff Rosebrook, in Logan County, where he is a longtime Perry Township trustee.
Joe Rosebrook, a lifelong resident of Union and Logan counties, was released from prison in March 2014 after serving a 10-year sentence for conspiracy to commit murder (of a different victim) in Logan County. He moved to Florida a few months after his release.
A third man, who has not been named, also was arrested. All three are being held on preliminary charges, but the paperwork has been sealed by a court in Geauga County, though a public database of Logan County jail inmates shows that Jeff Rosebrook is being held for another agency on charges of aggravated murder and murder.
More charges are expected soon, sources have confirmed. All three men are charged in the death of 31-year-old Daniel Ott, who was fatally shot inside his home in Geauga County’s Burton Township, south of Chardon, early in the morning of May 26, 2006.
The News-Herald newspaper in Willoughby initially reported that Ott and his girlfriend were in the process of moving to Michigan and that much of their belongings had already been taken there. The two were asleep on an air mattress when a masked, camouflage-wearing gunman broke in.
The Geauga County sheriff’s office said at the time that the intruder bound Ott’s hands with duct tape and shot him in the chest. The girlfriend was not hurt.
Authorities have always said there was nothing to indicate why Ott, who worked at a greenhouse, would have been targeted for an execution-style hit.
The Rosebrooks are well known in the Union and Logan county area.
Law-enforcement officers suspected since the early 1980s that Joe Rosebrook ran a vehicle chop shop, one that national insurance-fraud and vehicle-theft experts have said became one of the most prolific and well-organized of such operations in the nation. But no serious criminal charges against Rosebrook over the years ever stuck.
Then in 2004, Logan County detectives raided his sprawling $384,000, 75-acre property and turned up two classic muscle cars, an expensive Dodge pickup and a 2003 Ford truck worth nearly $40,000. All were stolen, and Joe Rosebrook was charged with, among other things, running a criminal enterprise.
While on house arrest when that case was pending, Rosebrook hired a man to kill a witness who he thought had turned on him. Rosebrook paid the man $2,000, gave him a photo and the address of the intended victim, and promised him another $13,000 after.
In a jailhouse interview with The Dispatch after he pleaded guilty to reduced charges as part of a plea deal that sent him to prison for 10 years, Rosebrook said he eventually called off the hit.
“My family was being threatened, and I thought they were in danger,” he said. “It was a stupid mistake. I didn’t want to go through with it.”
Thick case files at the Logan County sheriff’s office also list Joe Rosebrook as a suspect in a 1983 bombing of a van rigged with dynamite that critically injured a man about to testify against him in a criminal case. A mistrial was later declared. And he’s listed as a suspect in the 1999 disappearance of 18-year-old high-school dropout Michael Lattimer, who once worked for Rosebrook’s chop shop but had begun cooperating with authorities.
Relatives of Joe and Jeff Rosebrook could not be reached for comment. Jeff Rosebrook’s fellow township trustees, John Brose and Terry Cook, said on Tuesday that they are shocked. They first learned of the arrests when Jeff Rosebrook didn’t show up for work.
“We just don’t really know what to think or what’s going on,” Cook said.
He said Jeff Rosebrook has been a trustee at least 10 years and is well-respected.