A short drive through unimaginable heartbreak
Come along on a drive with me on the city’s Far East Side. The conversation will be grim, but you’ll make it home all right.
I live out this way, in a piece of Columbus so far east that we are in Fairfield County.
We’re following the route of a drive my son and I took earlier this year, on a summer night right before he left for his first year of college.
We’d gone on an extended fly-fishing trip in the summer in the mountains of Pennsylvania, but on one of his last nights we decided to squeeze in an hour or two of fishing at a pair of ponds closer to home, before we had to pick up his sister from her dance studio on Brice Road.
I spent many years reporting on many terrible things, the sort that stay with a person even years later.
So even on a good night, as this one in August was, my mind resurrects not only good personal memories that are tied to a place, but darker community events that have occurred there.
We start this drive heading west out of our subdivision to Hines Road, passing Southern Hills Drive on the way. In a house down that street, a young woman named April Caleodis was killed in 2017 by her boyfriend.
Caleodis worked at Gahanna Animal Hospital, where friends still talk of her kindness and dedication to animals. I know this because my wife now works there, although we did not know her personally.
We turn right from Hines onto Refugee Road, beside the park where my son’s first Pinewood Derby was held, and where Caleodis’ boyfriend ended his own life shortly after taking hers.
Next we head south on Gender Road.
On the right, just before we cross Blacklick Creek and the bike trail my kids have been riding on for years, is Lowridge Drive.
There, in 2006, Gregory Guess and Shana White were executed as they sat in an SUV. They were found still inside the vehicle, which had been ditched in a nearby soybean field. Police said the
pair were killed because Guess was tangled up on charges that linked him to a Detroit-based drug ring. Some of his business associates apparently thought he was planning to roll on them.
“Gregory Guess didn’t have the disposition to be a drug dealer,” Nancy Moore, then an assistant Franklin County prosecutor, said during the trial of Robert Harris. “He was too nice.”
Harris ultimately was convicted and sentenced to two life terms.
White’s mother told Dispatch columnist Mike Harden back then that her daughter got caught up in the violence simply due to her relationship with Guess.
“She was naïve,” she had said. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into sometimes.”
The night that my son and I went fishing, our destination was a lesser-known city park three miles of south of Lowridge Drive.
At first the heat of that day kept the fish down, but the bite was on once the sun set and the evening cooled some. By the time we needed to head to the dance studio, we’d caught and released a few bass, crappie and channel catfish. A nice night.
So we’re driving north again. On our left is Schacht Family Farm. We used to go to the farm market there all summer long, for sweet corn and other produce. Eventually the family decided to open only in the fall. We still pick our own pumpkins there every October.
Before we cross Blacklick Creek again we can gaze west across Schacht’s fields, where even from a halfmile away we can see a tall tree rising alone beside Brice Road, which parallels Gender.
An old gravel drive still runs beside the tree, but the farmhouse that once stood there has been torn down. That had been the home of Randy Hummell. Hummell, 58, lived alone in the nearly century-old house, which was surrounded by farmland and originally owned by his grandparents. He was found shot to death inside in 2009.
There was no sign that anyone had broken in or taken anything from the house, police said. Family members told detectives that Hummell had no known enemies. His sister, Sharon Forsythe, of Texas, told The Dispatch that her brother was “a quiet, modest man” who lived frugally and “loved the peaceful nature of life on his family’s farm.”
“He was a very gentle soul,” she said. “We can’t imagine who would want to hurt him.”
The police never found out who did; his killing remained unsolved.
After picking up my daughter from dance, we headed home east on Tussing Road past the elementary school where both my children attended, and where a candlelight vigil was held on Dec. 6, 2020, for 12-yearold Lidia Ghide, who died after a neighbor unintentionally fired a rifle he was cleaning into her apartment.
Believe me when I say that I haven’t touched upon all the tragedy that haunts this absolutely ordinary loop we’ve just taken, but I do want to mention three more deaths.
They happened Tuesday night, when two children, ages 6 and 9, and a young man were killed in a hail of gunfire as they sat in a vehicle at an apartment complex off of Gender Road. They are the 184th, 185th and 186th homicides to have occurred in Columbus so far this year, police said.
“We cannot allow this to continue,” Columbus Assistant Police Chief Lashanna Potts said at the scene.
That complex, where three young lives were extinguished so violently, abuts the ponds where my son and I spent that recent night fishing. We briefly parked in one of the lots there, in fact.
Don’t write off my part of the city, or any other, as inherently “bad.” This is a good place to live, and whether you know it or not, I likely could take you on a similar tour of your own neighborhood. If we give up on one neighborhood, all of us suffer.
If we stand firm and demand more action, especially from those who would lead us, we might spare some of our neighbors unimaginable and needless heartbreak. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker