Officer who fired shot at stabbing suspect cleared
Garrett Keener of Columbus rappels down the 330-foot tall Chase Tower at 100 E. Broad St. Downtown. Keener was among 115 people who earned the opportunity to rappel down the building Friday after raising $1,250 each for the third Over the Edge fundraiser for Gracehaven in its fight against child sex trafficking.
Investigators have cleared a Columbus police officer who fired his gun at a suspect in a March 2017 stabbing that left a 19-year-old woman hospitalized.
A Columbus Division of Policereview board found that Officer Frank Miller, an 18-year veteran, acted within the department’s policy.
Miller and Officer Joseph Abdalla responded on March 23, 2017 to reports of a woman bleeding from her neck outside her home on the 2300 block of Neil Avenue in the North Campus neighborhood.
They found 19-year-old Melanie Chica on the front lawn covered in blood and seriously injured. She told a bystander that her roommate, 22-year-old Erza Cason, had stabbed her. Abdalla took a first aid kit from a police cruiser and applied pressure to Chica’s neck.
Witnesses told officers that Cason was still in the house. He ran out the back door after officers entered the home. Miller confronted Cason outside the house, then fired at him and missed.
It is not clear if Cason was armed when Miller fired. Police later found two bloody knives outside the house.
Cason fled across a field roughly 200 yards away from the house before officers caught and arrested him. He had cuts on his arms and both he and Chica were taken to OhioHealth Grant Medical Center where they were treated and eventually released.
A grand jury indicted Cason on two counts of felonious assault and one count each of attempted murder, kidnapping, aggravated menacing and harassment with a bodily substance. He has pleaded not guilty and the case has yet to go to trial.
The incident was not Miller’s first shooting.
The 48-year-old officer fatally shot an armed man on the North Side in a dark stairwell in the Abbey Lane Apartments in Goldengate Square West.
Miller was one of the officers who responded in March 2010 to a report of shots fired and a man arguing with a woman in Abbey Lane. Once inside the building, officers confronted 27-yearold Nyl R. O’Day, who police said pointed a gun at the officers.
Miller fatally shot O’Day. An internal investigation concluded that he acted within the department’s policy.