With hot weather, more people outside and students out of school, July and August are traditionally the busiest months for the Lorain Police Department. Overnight shifts on the weekend are often the busiest time. To give readers a better idea how police cope during busy shifts, reporter Evan Goodenow spent about eight hours riding along with officers overnight this weekend.

LORAIN — The bar fight at Gil’s International Lounge on East 28th Street was over by the time police Officer Wesley Fordyce arrived around 1:25 a.m. Saturday, but the night was still young. Minutes after Fordyce arrived, he was soon back in his cruiser heading to the possible shooting of a 16-year-old in the 800 block of West 17th Street.

Police Officer Christopher Colon frisks a suspect during a drug-related traffic stop on West 20th Street about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Seated is William Malone, who police said was carrying a small amount of crack cocaine. (CT photo by Evan Goodenow.)

“Welcome to the weekend,” Fordyce said as he headed to the crime scene with a caravan of cruisers at 70 mph with lights and sirens activated. Patrol work is often feast or famine, but officers like Fordyce usually find themselves bouncing from call to call overnight on weekends.

Through Friday morning, officers had responded to 33,482 calls so far this year, according to Lorain police. That compares with 29,501 at the same time last year, an approximately 13.5 percent increase. July was the busiest month this year with 5,640 calls.

Many of the calls were routine — earlier, Fordyce had counseled a suicidal female and checked out a suspicious car parked in the driveway of a vacant home — but shooting calls are the most serious. Around 3:30 a.m. Friday, Officer Craig Payne apprehended city resident Brandon Atkinson at gunpoint after Atkinson allegedly shot a man in the foot.

Nearly 24 hours later, Payne, a 32-year-old officer who joined the department in 2005, tried to sort out the details of the latest incident from the woozy 16-year-old who was bleeding from the head.

“Is that a bullet wound or did you get pistol whipped?” Payne asked the boy as they sit in an ambulance.

The boy told Payne he was pistol whipped and then shot at as he ran. A bloody handprint was on the porch of the house in the 1600 block of Washington Avenue that the boy ran through as he fled.

“I heard a boom-boom, and he just ran up on my porch,” a woman at the house told police. “There’s blood all over the place.”

The boy said the shooters accused him of shooting into a house earlier in the day which he denied. Witnesses said the boy has a bounty of “75 stacks” on his head.

Stacks is slang for bindles of heroin, which have an approximately $20 street value, meaning the bounty is about $1,600. “Seventy-five bindles is a lot for a heroin addict, or you could sell it,” Fordyce said.

The incident was one of about 20 calls Fordyce had responded to since his shift officially began at 6 p.m. Fordyce also handled eight calls between 2:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. on overtime.

Patrol officers work 12-hour shifts from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. On Saturday night, there were 10 officers on patrol including a rookie riding with a field training officer. The department, which is hiring nine new officers, has 91 officers but about 20 unfilled positions due to budget constraints.

Fordyce — a 34-year-old officer who joined Lorain police last year after eight years as a Cleveland Clinic police officer — said this summer seems busier than last year. He predicted that the department will probably exceed the 49,963 calls responded to last year.

“For the size of our city, we have an immense call volume,” Fordyce said. “We’ve had a lot more shootings, felonious assaults and stabbings than we did last year.”

During slow periods, Fordyce tries to be proactive. He advised a suspected prostitute walking on Oberlin Avenue near West 16th Street to go home, warning her that two women were recently assaulted in the area. He reluctantly told youths playing basketball in the playground at Washington Elementary School to leave. Fordyce would prefer to let them play, but a city ordinance forbids people from being on school grounds when school’s out.

“When they’re playing ball and having a good time they’re not shooting each other up,” he said. “Sometimes you hate to send them back to their homes because they don’t have a home life.”

Around 4 a.m., 15 or 16 shots were fired from a vehicle at another car in the 1300 block of West 14th Street, but the shooter was long gone when police arrived. Because 911 calls must be routed from county dispatchers to local dispatchers before officers get information, Fordyce said it’s tough to catch drive-by shooters.

“Sometimes it seems like we’re going all night chasing those guys,” he said. “We’ll be chasing shadows all night.”

Saturday night ended with shots fired in a domestic dispute around 11:55 p.m. in the 100 block of West 23rd Street. Angry about her husband going to a bar, an Akron resident told officers she snatched the keys from his car. He followed her to her car and demanded them back. The wife, who was charged with domestic violence and illegally discharging a firearm, admitted she pulled out a .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol and fired two shots in the air as she and her husband argued.

“Fun, fun, fun, another gun,” said Officer Corey Middlebrooks as officers searched for the shell casings. Middlebrooks, a narcotics officer, said the pistol was the fourth gun police seized last week.

Middlebrooks, a 42-year-old officer who joined the department in 1998, and his partner, Christopher Colon, ride in an unmarked vehicle and back up patrol officers on serious calls such as the shooting incident. However, their primary job is narcotics interdiction. As they drove around the west side of the city early Sunday morning, they pointed out several drug houses they helped shut down.

Narcotics officers have been nicknamed “the jump out boys” by local drug dealers for quickly getting out of their unmarked vehicle to make street arrests. They play a cat and mouse game with drug dealers, shifting their work schedules to keep the dealers on their toes.

“Our road guys do a hell of a job, but they don’t have the time to just sit and watch a drug house,” said Colon, a 37-year-old officer who joined the department in 1999. “The minute we leave and neglect this area, things start happening.”

On a traffic stop of a suspected drug dealer on West 20th Street around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, Middlebrooks pulled William T. Malone out of the passenger side of a pickup truck. He recognized Malone — a 38-year-old city resident with an extensive criminal record — from a recent drug house raid.

“Did you spit the dope out?” Middlebrooks asked Malone. “You got a mouth full of crack!”

Middlebrooks recovered a rock of crack about the size of a baby’s tooth that Malone allegedly tried to swallow. Malone is due in Lorain Municipal Court this morning on cocaine possession, possession of drug paraphernalia and tampering with evidence charges.

While the department is short on officers and long on calls, officers like Fordyce said they enjoy working nights. Fordyce said he took a big pay cut after leaving the Cleveland Clinic, but likes patrolling his hometown and working with fellow officers whom he said he trusts with his life.

“We get paid a lot less than other departments and do a s—load more work than they do,” he said. “You’re here because you want to be.”

Contact Evan Goodenow at 329-7129 or egoodenow@chroniclet.com.

ELYRIA — The city is in the middle of a tug-of-war between residents who want to see the property and land Wal-Mart abandoned on Griswold Road turned into green space and the Arkansas-based corporation’s rights as private property owners.

A worker checks the pump pulling smelly water from the basement of the former Maplewood Elementary School. (CT photo by Bruce Bishop.)

John Pittman, a resident of West River Road North, is leading the charge to get the property cleared and said he will keep working at it until he is successful.

“For me, this started four years ago when they said they wanted to turn the property into a Walmart Supercenter. They put up a construction fence, but just let it waste away while they decided they didn’t want to bother with the store at all,” Pittman said from his front yard, which faces the east side of the property. “This company has the money. They can just bring the buildings down, clear the land and just leave it as vacant space until someone comes along to buy it.”

The area in question is roughly 20 acres and includes several buildings, the most notable being the old Maplewood Elementary School. Another brick building on the land was used by the state as an unemployment office.

Wal-Mart purchased the property in 2006 with the idea it would build a superstore to replace a store near Midway Mall at the Midway Crossings Plaza. But in the years that followed, Wal-Mart built a store in Lorain and closed the Midway Crossings store. The property has been for sale for several years.

Wal-Mart has not responded to a request for comment.

Pittman said over the years he has spoken with Wal-Mart officials to no avail. It was not until a town hall meeting hosted by Councilman Mark Craig, I-4th Ward, that he said someone from the city finally listened to his concerns about tall grass growing around the property and standing water in and around the buildings.

Kevin Brubaker, deputy safety service director, said the first time he toured the property earlier this summer he found that the school had been breached and there was evidence that someone had trespassed. Water in the school had completely inundated the basement and up to the first floor landing.

“My first call to Wal-Mart was not a happy call, because I told them they had to secure the fence and the building, cut the grass and get the water out of the building,” he said. “And, I must say they have done just that, which leaves us a little hand-tied to force them to take the building down. They were very receptive and quick to answer.”

Thursday, a private company hired by Wal-Mart to handle the water issues in the building could be seen using a huge sewer vacuum to pump water from the building into the city’s wastewater system. It was an all-day job.

Brubaker said the city sent a crew from its Wastewater Department to do a water test last week to check for chlorine and PCBs before giving Wal-Mart the go-ahead to dump the water into the city sewers. Also, the pumps were metered so a sewer bill could be sent to Wal-Mart when the clean-up was done.

In two days, crews pumped more than 810,000 gallons of water out of the old school.

“With what they will pay for sewer services and what they paid the company to do the work, I think they probably could have just taken the building down and been done with it,” he said. “But at this point, as long as they do their job to keep the property secure, the city will not have a major concern. We are not going to push too hard. They are being a good neighbor and we are working with them to positively get them to do the right thing.”

Pittman said he won’t stop until he can look out his window and see nothing but a clear lot.
“I’m looking out for my neighborhood,” he said. “It’s been an eyesore for so many years and I will keep at it,” he said.

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com.

Dembie

GRAFTON TWP. — Lorain County Jail Corrections Officer William Dembie Jr. called the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office around 1:30 a.m. Thursday and calmly confessed to Dispatcher Joy Sanchez that he had just killed his wife, Holly Dembie.

Listen to the 911 call:

In a recording of the call, released today by the sheriff’s office, William Dembie originally said there was a fight at the couple’s home at 14900 Cowley Road and when Sanchez asked him to clarify there had been a fight, he replied, “Uh, more like almost a beheading, yeah.”

Deputy County Coroner Eric Lockhart has said that the 33-year-old Holly Dembie wasn’t beheaded, but some of the multiple stab wounds on her body were in the neck area.

When Sanchez asked who he had killed, William Dembie replied, “My wife, my ex-wife,” before giving a little laugh.

William Dembie, 42, insisted that he wasn’t a threat to the deputies whom Sanchez had dispatched to the scene. He said he was in the kitchen and that Holly Dembie’s body was in the backyard, as was the Ka-Bar combat knife he used to kill her.

“I don’t have nothing. I’m not, I’m not dangerous. I just couldn’t deal with her shit anymore,” Dembie said.

Dembie also told Sanchez that he was alone at the house, except for his dog.

“Just take good care of my dog,” he said.

The couple’s 4-year-old son was at his mother-in-law’s, Dembie told Sanchez. He also said that while he’d had a few drinks, he wasn’t drunk.

Although Sanchez had asked Dembie to remain on the line, the call eventually went dead. Deputies have said Dembie met them at the house and confessed to killing his wife.

Dembie, who is being held in the Erie County Jail on a $5 million bond, has been charged with murder and domestic violence.

Read Saturday’s Chronicle for more on this story.

ELYRIA — Johnny Smith Jr., the man allegedly punched by an Elyria police officer while handcuffed to a hospital bed, is back in the Lorain County Jail after testing positive for cocaine.

Smith

Smith, 43, was released from jail less than two weeks ago after serving six months on charges of failure to comply, obstructing official business and DUI for the Jan. 27 incident that led to his arrest.

According to Elyria Municipal Court records, during a Thursday hearing Smith admitted to using cocaine. The drug use violated a condition of his plea agreement in a 2010 case in which he pleaded no contest to attempted unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.

He was supposed to remain clean for five years or he would have to serve a 120-day jail sentence, court records showed.

Court records also indicated that Smith, who was awarded $50,000 from the city of Elyria to avoid a threatened lawsuit, had just paid off the fines in the 2010 case.

A call to Smith’s lawyer wasn’t returned Thursday.

Smith was one of two men arrested by Elyria police officers following the theft of steaks and beer from Apples grocery store on Cleveland Street. Police reports indicate he nearly ran over Elyria police Officer James Rider with the semi he was driving, but Smith has said he didn’t see Rider.

Police surrounded the truck on Cleveland Street and reported having to physically remove a struggling Smith from the cab and force him into handcuffs. Smith has said he complied with officers, whom he has accused of beating him without reason.

Special Prosecutor John Reulbach Jr. and police have both found those allegations unfounded following their investigations.

After Smith was subdued, he was placed in a police car and taken to EMH Medical Center in Elyria so that his injuries could be checked out. While he was there the intoxicated Smith — he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.355, well above the legal limit — made a comment that he wished more police officers had died on March 15, 2010.

That’s the day Ronald Palmer ambushed and killed Elyria police Officer James Kerstetter, who was responding to a call on 18th Street. Elyria police officers Jay Loesch and Donald Moss later shot and killed Palmer when he refused orders to surrender and charged Loesch.

Loesch was one of the officers at the hospital with Smith and after he heard the comment, he and Officer Richard Walker closed to the door to Smith’s hospital room, and Loesch allegedly struck Smith once in the face.

A nurse told police she saw the blow on a monitor connected to a video camera in the room.
Loesch was given a 10-day suspension — five days of which he won’t have to serve unless he gets in trouble again in the next year — following an internal police investigation.

Smith and his lawyer later requested a criminal investigation into Loesch’s behavior, and Reulbach charged Loesch with misdemeanor assault, a charge to which the veteran officer has pleaded not guilty.

Contact Brad Dicken at 329-7147 or bdicken@chroniclet.com.