Crime Stoppers asks public for help amid violence
For Toni Howard, not a day has gone by since Sept. 29 that she hasn’t thought about her late grandson.
Dawaun Lewis-taylor was only 15 when he was fatally shot around 3 p.m. Sept. 29. on the 4800 block of Heatherton Road on the Northeast Side. His killer has not yet been caught.
“Our family is still in shock,” Howard said.
She sat inside a Franklin County Sheriff’s office substation on the city’s West Side Friday morning, listening to Sheriff Dallas Baldwin and Columbus police Chief Thomas Quinlan urge people to come forward with tips to Central Ohio Crime Stoppers.
Howard hopes someone comes forward with information in her grandson’s case.
“We have all these questions but no answers,” she said. “I pray someone has compassion to come forward.”
Baldwin and Quinlan, along with members of the Central Ohio Crime Stoppers board, urged the public to provide information anonymously to help solve a wave of new cases brought by increasing gun violence in the city and county. Information, they said, is critical.
“We’re seeing an increase in solvability, but we aren’t seeing a decrease in the number of crimes being committed,” Quinlan said. “All these little dots of information can lead us to that one person we need to get off the streets.”
Baldwin said the sheriff’s office, which investigates an average of about nine homicides a year, has already had that many homicide investigations with two months to go in the year. Columbus is also on pace to surpass the record-143 homicides that occurred in 2017 by the end of 2020.
“Nothing replaces someone who’s been taken from us,” Baldwin said. “But, nothing replaces that phone call (to Crime Stoppers).”
Deputy Chief Rick Minerd, who oversees the sheriff’s office investigations unit, said seven of the nine homicides have been solved. The case that remains unsolved involves Carl Peay II, 27, of the Northeast Side, and Mia Shane, 24, originally of the Toledo area, who were shot and killed around 11:30 p.m. Sept. 1 at an apartment complex on Chatterton Road in Truro Township. Minerd said the pair had gotten into a vehicle in the parking lot when they were ambushed by two suspects that had waited possibly 15 to 20 minutes. More than a dozen shots were fired and both Peay and Shane died at the scene.
In another case, Minerd said a tidbit of seemingly irrelevant information led to a break in a homicide investigation. Following the shooting of 21year-old Sage Martin, of the South Side, outside the former Westland Mall on Sept. 20, deputies received a tip about a COTA bus being in the area at the time.
Minerd said cameras on the bus helped detectives identify the vehicle the suspect, 17-year-old Javontae Williams, left in and helped get enough evidence to make an arrest.
Williams was arrested Thursday in the Mansfield area on a delinquency count of murder.
“We often talk about taking back our streets and this is one way to do that,” Central Ohio Crime Stoppers President Napoleon Bell said. “No tip is not good enough. It might be the missing link we need.”
Information that leads to an arrest and indictment in a case could lead to a monetary reward. Bell said most information that results in an arrest results in a reward, the amount of which is voted on by the Crime Stoppers board.
Tips to Crime Stoppers can be provided anonymously by calling 614-461TIPS, submitting tips online at www.stopcrime.org or using the free P3 Tips mobile application. All tips to Crime Stoppers can be anonymous. bbruner@dispatch.com @bethany_bruner
“We’re seeing an increase in solvability, but we aren’t seeing a decrease in the number of crimes being committed.” Thomas Quinlan Columbus police chief