Columbus Police Chronicle Pursuit, Shootout

Feb. 11, 2014
Columbus police released more information and video detailing a fatal police pursuit from May 15, 2013.

Hours before Columbus police officers unloaded nearly 200 rounds at the gold SUV in Clintonville, it had been spotted at an apartment complex elsewhere in that North Side neighborhood.

Officers Ty Stoneking and Daniel Wolf were responding to a disturbance call at the Worthington Gardens Apartments before dawn on May 15, 2013, when they saw the GMC Denali pull out of the parking lot as they pulled in.

"They just drove past us, and we just were like, 'Hey, let's see who that was,'??" Wolf later told an investigator. "They just kinda looked a little suspicious."

Their accounts and other information about that day come from a 720-page investigative packet, cruiser-dashboard cameras and crime-scene video compiled by the Police Division's critical incident response team.

All that information was recently released by police after a months-long review of the May shootings by police that left Emmanuel Gatewood and Kourtney Hahn dead in the parking lot of a Clintonville fire station.

Wolf's suspicions were right. Later, the officers were sent back to the complex to search for Gatewood, a suspect in the killing of Lance Glenn, 29, who had been shot outside an E. Hudson Street after-hours bar on April 5. When the officers returned, the gold SUV -- registered to Gatewood's mother -- was parked in the lot.

They didn't find Gatewood, 24, but they spoke to Hahn, his girlfriend, in an apartment.

She told police that she hadn't seen him. Officers searched every room, under beds and in closets. Other officers were sent to Gatewood's mother's house on Brentnell Avenue. Gatewood was not found.

The next time an officer would see Hahn, 21, she would be slumped over in the SUV, her body riddled with bullets.

After officers searched the apartment, they were told to wait and watch the parked SUV. So they waited outside the apartment complex, watching the exit.

At 5:08 a.m., the gold SUV pulled out, and Wolf and Stoneking followed. They turned on their emergency lights, but the SUV didn't pull over.

For 4.7 miles and eight minutes, they followed the SUV as it looped through a neighborhood along the Clintonville-Worthington line and back south on N. High Street.

Other officers joined the low-speed chase. The SUV hit stop sticks laid out on N. High Street near North Broadway, flattening at least one tire.

As the SUV pulled onto W. Brighton Road, Stoneking and Wolf heard gunfire and saw the back window of the SUV shatter. The investigation doesn't say who was shooting from the SUV.

Both officers returned fire: Stoneking as he drove, firing through the windshield, and Wolf out the passenger side of the cruiser.

Their cruiser was hit three times. One bullet pierced the windshield.

"I'm hit! I'm hit! 10-3," Wolf yelled, giving the code for an officer in trouble. "I'm hit!"

Stoneking peeled off and sped toward OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital. Neither officer had been hit by a bullet, but both had been cut by glass and shrapnel. They were released from the hospital that morning.

Other cruisers picked up the chase of the SUV for three-tenths of a mile more. The SUV jerked to the left and off the road, running over bushes and coming to a stop in the parking lot of Fire Station 19 at 3601 N. High St.

Cruisers stopped in the middle of N. High Street, and officers jumped out, firing at the SUV.

Five officers fired, unloading 194 rounds into the SUV in a matter of seconds. Some officers changed out their magazines three times. Officers Andrew Ross, Kyle Andrews, David Salsgiver, Patrick Daugherty and Craig Haller all fired shots.

A grand jury has cleared the five officers, plus Stoneking and Wolf, of wrongdoing. They now await judgment by the Police Division's firearms/police involved death review board. That board, which reviews any gunfire by police as standard procedure, will determine whether the officers acted within policy.

It wasn't until the officers got closer that they realized that more than one person was in the SUV. Hahn, in the driver's seat, bore the brunt of the fire, suffering 17 gunshot wounds, mostly in her head and back.

She was dead, still in a seat belt and slumped over an Interdynamics Model KG-99 9 mm handgun. Another gun, a Keltec .32-caliber pistol, also was found in the vehicle.

Gatewood was alive and between the front seats, reaching toward a magazine in the back. The officers fired multiple times at him at close range. He was hit four times.

Even in his last moments, Gatewood resisted. As three officers pulled him from the SUV, he was " fighting," one of the officers said. Bleeding from the neck and mouth, he was facedown, his hands underneath him to keep officers from handcuffing him.

Three or four swift kicks from one of the officers stilled him. The officers secured his hands behind his back, the word tattooed on his neck visible: Heartless.

Copyright 2014 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

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