Slaying disrupts apartments’ quiet night

Lucille Collins said she was sitting on the couch of her Rosewind apartment on Saturday night when she heard “pow, pow, pow, pow.”

“I said, ‘Damn, did they kill him?’” said Collins, who assumed that someone had been shot nearby.

Tyrone Hilton, 50, died around the corner at 1352 Terrace Lane after two armed men entered his residence about 10 p.m., demanded property from another occupant, Lamont Quarterman, 27, and shot the occupants as they fled, police said.

According to police, the gunmen shot Quarterman in the arm and shot Hilton in the upper body. Quarterman was treated at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.

A 5-year-old girl in the residence was unharmed.

No arrests had been made as of last night.

A number of neighbors in the Rosewind complex said they heard gunshots. Ashley Portis said her 10-year-old son, Jalleahl, returned home after playing on a nearby playground. “He said, ‘Mom, they’re out there with fireworks.’ I said, ‘Those were gunshots.’

“My boys really didn’t sleep last night,” said Portis, whose other son was celebrating his ninth birthday on Saturday. “They were scared. We all kind of held each other.”

The location in South Linden has a notorious history as the former site of Windsor Terrace, a housing project overrun by gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rosewind rose from the rubble of the demolished Windsor Terrace in the late 1990s.

A charcoal grill sits on the patio of 1352 Terrace Lane, with a can of lighter fluid beside it and a DirectTV satellite dish just around the corner. The grass is cut, the bushes are trimmed, and lampposts line the sidewalks and streets through the quiet complex. The only evidence of crime is the yellow police tape circling the yard.

A neighbor who lives across Terrace Lane from the scene of Saturday’s shooting said she was shocked. The neighbor, who didn’t want to give her name, said the south end of the complex was peaceful.

“That doesn’t happen over here,” she said.

Yvonne Weaver, who lives near the scene of the shooting, is a member of Rosewind’s resident council. She said a number of the neighbors, mostly young mothers, approached her, saying they were scared.

“I told them, ‘It was a home invasion. You’ve got to have something in your home that someone wants, and that someone has to know it’s there,’” Weaver said. “They had something that someone thought was worth invading for.”

But Portis said she’s moving. “I’m scared, because it’s starting to be dramatized back here now. Your life don’t mean nothing when they want what you’ve got.”