Man called 911 after shooting neighbor

“I shot a man,” Joshua S. Ferrell calmly told a Columbus police 911 operator Wednesday afternoon.

Ferrell, 30, told the operator that he acted in self-defense. He said the neighbor, whose name he didn’t know, had come to his house and started a fight.

“He’s on top of me. I told him to get off of me and he wouldn’t get off of me,” Ferrell said, noting that he then fired a gun, according to his 911 call.

When the 911 operator asked him what happened to the other man, Ferrell replied that he was in the middle of the street and wasn’t breathing.

Ferrell is now charged with murder for fatally shooting Mario DiPenti, 51, who lived just around the corner on Westmoor Place in their West Side neighborhood.

Ferrell’s bond was set at $500,000 Thursday morning during his first appearance in Franklin County Municipal Court. He remained in the county jail Thursday night.

Apparently, Ferrell made other phone calls before police arrived. A woman who works at Target Specialty Ferrell Products, a pest-control warehouse business, phoned a Columbus police 911 operator and told her that Ferrell had called her and stated he had shot a man.

The woman told the operator she first thought Ferrell, a past customer there, was joking and wondered if he was talking about shooting a bug. But Ferrell insisted he had shot a man, she reported.

Columbus homicide detectives investigated Ferrell’s claims of self-defense and charged him with murder after reviewing evidence, including a video provided to them of most of the street fight between the two men that led to the shooting, court records show.

Detectives and neighbors said there was bad blood between Ferrell and DiPenti and Columbus police had been called to the same neighborhood the day before.

According to 911 recordings, Ferrell made multiple calls to Columbus police operators starting at 8:42 p.m. Tuesday. Ferrell said that a man was driving around his neighborhood in a black Honda CR-V and appeared to be intoxicated. He said the man had come to his front door.

On one 911 call, Ferrell tells the operator that the man is in his yard and that he might have to get his gun. He then is heard yelling and cursing at the man. The operator told Ferrell to stay inside his house. “Sir, you are only making the situation worse,” she said.

Ferrell called 911 back and told an operator: “I had to punch him.” That operator also advised him to stay in the house.

There also was a call from an off-duty Franklin Township Police Department officer, who happened to drive through the neighborhood and was flagged down. He called 911 and told the operator the two men had been fighting and both appeared to be intoxicated.