Coroner rules death at strip club is a homicide

The death of a man whose body was found by firefighters responding to a fire inside a Far East Side strip club last week has been ruled a homicide by the Franklin County Coroner's office.

The ruling was made Tuesday, five days after the body was discovered Dec. 17 inside the Confidential Gentlemen's Club on the 1900 block of Lake Club Drive by Columbus firefighters responding to a passerby's report of smoke coming from the building.

It was the second homicide this year at the club and the fourth in the past two years at the large retail complex on Channingway Boulevard, just west of Brice Road and south of East Livingston Avenue, whose tenants include a daycare center and a beauty salon.

Sources have identified the victim to The Dispatch and reported he is a club employee, but the newspaper is withholding his name because the coroner's office has yet to officially confirm his identity.

When firefighters arrived at the strip club at 6:44 a.m. Dec. 7, Battalion Chief Steve Martin said the business was filled with smoke, but the fire was relatively small and “contained quickly.” Firefighters found a person inside and removed him, but that person was pronounced dead within 10 minutes after arrival.

The specific cause of death of the man is not being released, Sgt. James Marable of the Columbus police homicide unit said Tuesday.

With the death confirmed Tuesday as a homicide, it became the city's 194th homicide this year. The slaying added to a grim annual record that stood at 195 as of Tuesday night after Columbus police announced 58-year-old Anthony Merchant, shot multiple times Dec. 2 on the West Side, died Sunday of his injuries.

“It's an absolute war zone out there these days,” Brent Davis, a Dublin-based commercial real estate broker who managed the retail building where the strip club is located and an adjacent sevenstory office building until the property was sold early this month.

Davis said he wasn't surprised to hear about another violent incident there.

“But the level of brutality is surprising,” he said. “I'm not sure what was to be accomplished by setting his corpse on fire. It's terrible.”

On June 12, 34-year-old Clyde Woods of Cleveland was fatally stabbed outside the strip club just after 2:30 a.m. No arrests have been made.

In August 2020, two men died in separate shootings in the parking lot on the opposite side of the building from the club.

Demonte M. Rayford, 20, of the East Side, was fatally shot and another man was wounded in an exchange of gunfire just before 12:40 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2020. A Franklin County grand jury indicted a 29-year-old man in the case a month later, but prosecutors eventually dropped the charges because they had “no willing witnesses.”

Davis said that incident was a driveby shooting in which windows were shot out in several businesses, causing about $30,000 in damages.

The windows were still boarded up when Antoine Blackshear, 21, was struck by multiple gunshots on Aug. 24, 2020, outside a convenience store at the building shortly before noon. He died after being taken to Mount Carmel East Hospital. No arrests have been made in that case.

Davis said he managed and leased out spaces at the property for nearly seven years.

The property had struggled primarily with drug dealing, he said, but things got more violent in the past two years, seemingly “exacerbated” by the pandemic.

“There's virtually no policing out here,” Davis said. “This part of town needs some attention. It's a mess.” jfutty@dispatch.com @johnfutty