The Daily Blog

Two Adults, 3 Kids Found Dead in Ohio Home Overnight.

OAK HARBOR, Ohio — A sheriff’s office says two adults and their three children were found dead inside their northern Ohio home and a preliminary investigation indicates murder-suicide.

The Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department says the 911 call came in just after midnight Saturday. Sheriff Bob Bratton tells The Blade in Toledo two parents and three young children were found dead.

Authorities wouldn’t say how they died but said the community was not in danger.

A dispatcher says the investigation indicates there were multiple murders and a suicide.

Officers found them in a white-sided, two-story farm house on the edge of the town of Oak Harbor, about 25 miles southeast of Toledo. Investigators were seen loading a stretcher with one of the bodies into a funeral home minivan Saturday.

Mural Depicts George Clooney as ‘God’s Gift to Women’.

Let’s file this story under ‘Bizarre Celebrity Depictions.’ As George Clooney descends on Cincinnati, Ohio, this month to film a new movie, local fans have gone above and beyond to capture his, uh, beauty.

According to NBC affiliate WLWT, local artists at Studio Vertu have created a 4-foot-by-10-foot mural depicting Clooney as Adam in Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel painting. Yep, Clooney’s head has been placed onto Adam’s body, sans clothes and reaching out to the hand of God.

And the mural, aptly titled ‘God’s Gift to Women,’ is not just hanging in a local art gallery. The image, which was printed on Italian marble tiles, is prominently displayed on a wall outside Grant Street Studio.
“This is our homage to George Clooney,” said Mark Schmidt with Studio Vertu. “We decided to have a little fun with it, roll out the red carpet in our own way.”

Though not much is left up to the imagination in the painting, the image of Clooney’s body is specifically cropped right at the waist.

“Well, I didn’t want to compliment him, or insult him,” Schmidt said.

Clooney is currently in town filming ‘The Ides of March.’ According to IMDB, the actor, who co-stars with Ryan Gosling and Marisa Tomei, also co-wrote the screenplay and is directing the film, which centers around dirty politics during a presidential campaign

Ohio Executes One-Time Neo-Nazi Who Killed 3.

LUCASVILLE, Ohio - Ohio on Thursday a one-time neo-Nazi who shot to death two men and a teen more than a quarter-century ago on the campus of Cleveland State University in a shooting spree that targeted blacks.

Frank Spisak, who chose to read Bible verses in German for a final statement, was pronounced dead at 10:34 a.m. following an injection of sodium thiopental at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.Spisak, 59, set the Ohio record for the longest time on death row before execution, at more than 27 years.

He was also the last Ohio inmate to die by sodium thiopental, the scarce drug the state is giving up in favor of a more readily available substitute.

Spisak blamed the 1982 shootings on his hatred of gays, blacks and Jews and on his mental illness related to confusion about his sexual identity.

Spisak identified himself as a woman and referred to himself in correspondence as Frances Spisak, a name his attorneys also used.

Spisak read the first seven Bible verses from chapter seven of the book of Revelations from a handwritten yellow paper held over his head by a prison official, speaking in a halting voice and sometimes having trouble reading the verses. “I can’t read it, it’s too blurry, I can’t read it,” he said at one point.”Heil Herr,” he appeared to say when he was finished. It was unclear what he meant, as the phrase is not used in German.

His struggles with the German drew snickers from witnesses, who included the daughter of one victim, two brothers of another and John Hardaway, a surviving shooting victim.

“Speak English, you fool,” said Jeffrey Duke, the brother of slaying victim Brian Warford.

A few minutes earlier, Duke said injection was too easy and Spisak should have been hooked up to some kind of generator.

“That’s what he needs. A person like that, going around killing people just because he doesn’t like the color of their skin or their religion,” Duke said. “I’m sorry, that’s just how I feel.”

Duke’s brother, 17-year-old Brian Warford, was black, as was Spisak’s first victim, Rev. Horace Rickerson.

After prison warden Donald Morgan signaled to start the sodium thiopental at about 10:22 a.m., Spisak’s stomach rose and fell a few times, and after a minute he made several audible snoring sounds. He swallowed a few times and grew still about 10:25 a.m., his lips starting to turn blue about two minutes later.

“Oh God,” Eric Barnes, another of Warford’s brothers, said as Spisak died.

Barnes held photographs toward Spisak of Warford as a baby and a teen, and held a crucifix as Spisak read the Bible verses.

Spisak glanced at Warford’s brothers as he was strapped to the gurney, then looked away.

Warford’s mother, Cora Warford, said in a statement afterward that “justice has been served.”

The family of Timothy Sheehan, a Cleveland State University maintenance official killed in August 1982, praised the justice system.

“Today, we chose to celebrate the life of husband and father, Timothy Sheehan, not the death of Frank Spisak,” the statement said.

Other witnesses included Donald Nugent, a federal judge who was the original prosecutor in Spisak’s trial.

Spisak’s attorneys, who watched the execution, issued a statement saying Spisak committed his crimes because of severe mental illness, not out of hate.

“We have the ability to provide treatment and protect the public without killing mentally ill people who commit crimes,” said Alan Rossman and Michael Benz.

Spisak spent the night resting, listening to music and watching TV news. He wrote a letter - it was unknown to whom - and slept a little. He showered at 5 a.m. and received communion in a Roman Catholic mass in his cell at 7 a.m. He declined breakfast but had a cup of coffee.

The U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday afternoon rejected his final appeal, in which Spisak asked for a delay so he could argue the death penalty’s constitutionality based on recent comments by a state Supreme Court justice criticizing capital punishment in Ohio.

Last month, his attorneys asked the Ohio Parole Board to spare his life, saying Spisak suffers from a severe bipolar disorder that was not diagnosed until years after he was convicted.

But both the parole board and Gov. John Kasich, making his first decision on a condemned killer’s request for mercy, rejected Spisak’s plea.

Brian Warford was taking classes at Cleveland State as an alternative education student earning his high school degree when he was shot and killed in 1982.Prior to his slaying, Rickerson, 57, was killed Feb. 1 in a campus bathroom where he rebuffed Spisak’s sexual advances. The following Aug. 27, Sheehan, 50, a white man who worked in Cleveland State’s maintenance department, was killed because Spisak believed Sheehan might have witnessed Rickerson’s shooting.

Hardaway was shot seven times as he waited for a commuter train by a man he later identified as Spisak. He survived and had planned to witness the execution. On Aug. 9, 1982, Coletta Dartt, a white university employee, was shot at as she exited a bathroom stall. She pushed Spisak away and ran.

Spisak was caught in early September 1982 after he was found firing a gun out of his apartment window. He told investigators he went on “hunting parties” to shoot black people.

During his 1983 trial, Spisak grew a Hitler-style mustache, carried a copy of Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” and gave the Nazi salute to the jury.

Last weekend, Spisak met with his daughter. He was calm as he arrived at the death house at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville on Wednesday morning.

Ohio Gov. Asked to Pardon Mom Jailed in School Enrollment Fraud.

The governor of Ohio has received 165,000 petition signatures asking him to pardon Kelley Williams-Bolar, the woman who spent 10 days in jail for fraudulently enrolling her children in a more desirable school district.

Three nonprofit groups — ColorofChange.org, Change.org and MomsRising.org — delivered the petition to Gov. John Kasich’s office Monday, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

The groups want Kasich to pardon Williams-Bolar, 40, whose felony convictions could disqualify her from becoming a school teacher.”She has been robbed of the opportunity to elevate her life and the lives of her family through her own hard work,” the petition on Change.Org says. “She has been handed what equates to a life sentence for attempting to protect her children.”

Williams-Bolar said she registered her two daughters for school using her father’s address because she feared for their safety at their home in Akron if they were home alone after school.

The school district said the cost of educating the girls was $36,000 and prosecuted Williams-Bolar on felony charges of tampering with residency records.

“We’re still gathering facts on it,” Rob Nichols, the governor’s spokesman, said Monday. “People feel passionately about it, and we’re grateful to them for expressing their concerns.”

The case provoked an outcry, with many saying that Williams-Bolar, a single mother, was victimized because she is African-American.

Some even went so far as to equate her with Rosa Parks, the Alabama woman who sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in 1955.

But not everyone thought the comparison was justified. Writing in The Washington Post, Valerie Strauss said that Parks showed more courage by publicly defying an unjust law.

“Williams-Bolar didn’t take a public stand, nor did she decide to give up her public housing subsidy and move in with her father so her children could legally go to the school she preferred,” Strauss wrote. “That’s a different story.”

10-Year-Old Ohio Boy Suspected of Killing His Mother.

Investigators in north central Ohio have taken a 10-year-old boy into custody for suspicion of killing his mother with a .22 caliber rifle, police said.

According to the Holmes County Sheriff’s Office, a police dispatcher received an emergency call about 6 p.m. Sunday. The caller told police that a neighbor boy had come to the caller’s home and said he just shot his mother, a police press release said.

Police and emergency medical responders were sent to the boy’s home on Route 511 in Big Prairie, an unincorporated community about 75 miles south of Cleveland. When they arrived on the scene, they discovered the victim, 46-year-old Deborah L. McVay, face-down inside the home. McVay had been shot once in the head and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.The 10-year-old boy, who is not being identified because of his age, was taken into custody and transported to the Richland County Juvenile Detention Center in Mansfield. The victim’s body is being examined by the Stark County Coroner’s Office.

The victim’s 15-year-old daughter has been placed in the care of relatives, police said. Her whereabouts at the time of the shooting remain unclear.

According to Cleveland’s WEWS-TV Channel 5 News, the 10-year-old boy is scheduled to appear in Holmes County Juvenile Court today.

Contacted by AOL News, the Holmes County Sheriff’s Office said the investigation is ongoing and they had no additional information to release on the case.

Deputy, Suspect Dead in Ohio Trailer Park Standoff.

E

NON, Ohio — A sheriff’s deputy investigating a report of gunfire at a trailer park was shot dead Saturday, and the shooting suspect was killed after a gun battle with police, authorities said. A police officer was wounded.

The slain deputy was married and was the mother of two children, Clark County Sheriff Gene Kelly said. He didn’t release the names of the deputy or the suspect killed in the standoff in Enon Beach, about 50 miles west of Columbus.

The deputy was shot as she tried to photograph a footprint in the mobile-home park, which sits near a highway, Kelly said.

“Our deputy never had the opportunity to return fire or take cover,” he said at a press conference.Police officers were trying to retrieve the deputy’s body when the suspect fired on them from inside a trailer, and a German Township officer was wounded in a large exchange of gunfire, Kelly said. There were “many, many, many” shots fired by the suspect and police, he said.

Enon Beach resident Angelina Inman said she looked out of her trailer to see the deputy lying on the ground. She watched as another officer tried to reach her body.”He was itching to get her,” Inman said. “He kept radioing in, can he please get her, and he was told no because it wasn’t secure. You could see that male sheriff crying - he wanted to get her, he wanted to get her bad.”

It appears that it was gunfire from Clark County deputies that killed the suspect, said Kelly, who has been sheriff for 24 years. He said he had hired the slain deputy and had known her since the police academy. He called her “just a good person, an outstanding deputy,” and said she was the first officer he’s lost.

“This,” Kelly said, “is the worst day of my entire law enforcement career.”

Enon Beach sits near Interstate 70 and acts as a seasonal campground with some summer-only residents and others who live there year-round. A portion of the highway was closed twice for a total of about an hour because the trailer park is so close to the roadway, Ohio State Highway Patrol Lt. Gary Lewis said.

A girl who lives in the trailer park said she knew the shooting suspect and he had a temper.

“He was a quiet person, but if you made him mad - he wasn’t very pleasant,” 15-year-old Chelsea Bagley said.

Her mother’s boyfriend, John Burkhardt, said he heard the shots fired in the neighborhood. Police then arrived, Burkhardt said, and for several minutes authorities asked the suspect over a loud speaker to come out and surrender.

“They give him 25 chances to walk out of there,” Burkhardt said. “They were begging him to come out, but he wouldn’t come out.”

Shortly after, Burkhardt said, authorities opened fire on the man’s trailer.

“All hell broke loose,” he said.

Ex-KC and the Sunshine Band Bassist Gets 7 Years in Prison for Teen Sex Charges.

Telling a judge he was embarrassed, disgusted and ashamed, a former member of KC and the Sunshine Band has been sentenced in Ohio to seven years in prison for sex charges involving teen boys.

Bassist and music producer Richard Finch entered pleas of no contest in Licking County Common Pleas Court on Monday to unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and several other charges.

His voice breaking, the 56-year-old Finch apologized to a judge and the teens, saying he had little memory of the activities because he was impaired by alcohol.

The multiple Grammy Award winner was arrested in March after police said a boy reported that he’d had sexual contact with Finch at the man’s home in Newark in central Ohio. They said Finch later admitted he’d had sexual contact with boys ranging in age from 13 to 17.
Finch told the judge he takes “responsibility 100 percent” for his conduct and that it was less than his character.

“I am very proud of the legacy in the music business that I have created, but sadly because of my stupidity while under the influence of alcohol, I will not be remembered for that contribution and, rather, I will be remembered for this unfortunate moment in time,” Finch said. “It is my own fault and I will work hard to regain trust and respect from those I let down, including myself.”

He removed his glasses and wiped away tears just before the judge handed down the sentence.

The Newark Advocate reports court records say Finch paid a 15-year-old boy $100 for sexual acts in a closet of his home where guitars are stored.

The records say that Finch had told teens, “The music industry is all about sex and drugs” and “If you tell your parents, they’re going to … freak out, they are older and they are not in the business.”

In March, KC and the Sunshine Band founder Harry Wayne Casey told PopEater he hoped to cease Finch’s affiliation with the band’s name.”I created KC & The Sunshine Band in 1973. Mr. Finch subsequently joined the band a year later. While his talent contributed to the early success of the KCSB sound, his involvement ended in 1980.”