It doesn’t feel like fall There’s more to victims than just their deaths
This column begins with an injustice wrought by me, inflicted within the span of two sentences.
Here they are:
“The deadly violence now tied to this group began with a June 2018 home invasion in North Linden that led to the killing of Connor Reynolds, 23, of Grove City.
“Larry J. Williams Jr., according to federal investigators, killed Reynolds during what was planned as a robbery of high-quality marijuana.”
Those two sentences were part of a column of mine that ran just about a month ago. They are at once factually accurate and deeply unfair to Connor.
If you’re a regular reader, you know I covered crime here at The Dispatch for about 10 years, and you also know that I still write frequently about crime in
my column, particularly when it comes to the homicidal violence that plays out with sickening regularity. More than a few readers, I suspect, would say that I write about it a little too frequently.
In the column in question, I focused on a particularly gruesome case now wending its way through U.S. District Court in Columbus, which involves the killings of a man and woman who were then dismembered and entombed in the concrete floor of a Hilltop basement.
My intent with that column was to underscore that atrocities like these aren't unfolding in some distant land at the behest of a foreign drug cartel, but right here in our backyard.
The two victims were killed, federal investigators say, to prevent Williams from being implicated in the earlier killing of Reynolds.
Those two sentences, though, were the only mention I made of Connor. His mother noticed.
Robin Reynolds has lived with the loss of her youngest for more than three years now.
“Do you know or care of Connor's backstory?” she asked me in an email.
I did, and I sat down with her last week to hear it.
This is the fuller story of Connor Reynolds, a young man who was his mother's “bright light.”
As a child he was full of energy. Eventually he was diagnosed with ADHD.
“He could be a stinker, too, honestly,” she said. “He never thought of consequences.”
Once, when Connor was about 10, she came home to a group of neighborhood children gathered around her house, looking up. Connor was no stranger to being grounded, and she remembers this being the case on that day.
Yet there he was out on the roof, talking to the kids below. He wore a Superman cape.
His personality began to darken in about the eighth grade, she said.
“He tried to quiet his mind with weed,” Reynolds said.
So far as she knows, he never progressed beyond marijuana and alcohol. But the high school years were a struggle, fought by the family largely in suburban isolation.
“If you look at the Hilliards, the Gahannas, the Westervilles, people don't want to talk about their kids and drug issues,” she said. “You keep that bottled up.”
Connor would tell his parents that he was sorry to disappoint them.
“He saw the hurt in his dad and I,” Reynolds said. “He'd say, ‘I know I'm an f-up. I know my brothers and sister aren't.'”
“He so wanted to be like his brothers and his sister,” she said.
They'd reply that they just wanted him to be himself, to be happy and drug-free. But there were conflicts. They made him take occasional drug tests. One time, Reynolds, in her pajamas, dragged him home from an underage drinking party.
“We finally got him to graduate,” she said. “It was down to the last test.”
He took some classes at Columbus State Community College, but that didn't last. He met a young woman; both worked in the restaurant business.
“He would always be working, but he would lose jobs, too,” Reynolds said.
About a year before he died, he started to turn things around. He took a job pouring concrete and enjoyed the work enough that he stayed with it. He and his girlfriend got a nice apartment in Canal Winchester. He showed it off to his parents.
“He was so proud of that apartment,” Reynolds said.
Then, in December 2017, his appendix burst. That surgery was soon followed by sinus surgery.
He couldn't work and couldn't pay the rent. He and his girlfriend were being evicted when, without telling his family, they moved in with an acquaintance who offered to rent them a room in exchange for $100 a month and some yard work.
They put all their belongings in storage, figuring the move was temporary.
Reynolds resisted the urge to coax them to move home instead. She knew her son wanted to make it on his own.
Connor must have known that Aaron Hager, who has since gone to prison on drug charges, was dealing marijuana out of the North Linden house, but Reynolds heard after her son's death that he and his girlfriend did not realize the extent of the drug business when they moved in.
After Connor was killed, a neighbor of Hager's shared with the Reynolds family that she was fond of the young man and had advised him to move out.
“Honey,” she told Connor one day as he helped with her groceries, “those are not your friends.”
But Connor never thought badly of anyone, Reynolds said.
“He made stupid decisions, that's for sure, but his whole backstory didn't start with him being in that drug house,” she said.
Police told the Reynolds family that the house was targeted by the robbers. Connor happened to be at the home at the time. He had been living there maybe six weeks when things went sideways on June 27, 2018.
Reynolds said she shares all this because she owes it to her son, and to other families with similar stories.
“That's sort of my mission now,” she said. “Connor was not a perfect person, but he was a wonderful person. I don't want him to be a postscript.” tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker