Holly Zachariah
The Columbus Dispatch
MARION, Ohio — Long before deputy sheriffs shot and killed 40-year-old Byron Holveck late Sunday, his life had spun out of control.
And so, after a day fueled by drinking and filled with violence, Holveck told his girlfriend even as she called 911 for help that he wasn’t going to go down easily.
Then he smashed the .22-caliber gun he’d been firing earlier and, while searching for his car keys to flee, grabbed a toy gun and charged at the responding deputies.
“He said he’d go out in a blaze of glory,” Heather Nightwine said yesterday as she stood on the porch of their home in the Pleasant Acres mobile-home park on Smeltzer Road, south of Marion. “His life was in a spiral. He was so sad and didn’t know what to do.”
Marion County Sheriff Tim Bailey said he initially believed that the gun Holveck had pointed at the deputies was real. Later, after a day of investigation, he said it was actually a black, Gamo P23 soft-air pistol that fires plastic pellets. Such guns look real, and police officers have long warned of their dangers.
By evening, after re-interviewing witnesses, Bailey said he thought this was a case of “suicide by cop.”
“You don’t take a toy gun and point it at the cops without knowing the end result,” the sheriff said.
It was about 10:15 Sunday night when, after responding to calls of shots fired, deputies found Holveck in his side yard. He turned, leveled his gun and charged at two deputies. Both Maj. Aaron Corwin, a 15-year veteran of the department, and six-year veteran Deputy Michael Wheeler fired their guns.
Holveck died in Grant Medical Center in Columbus.
Because it was a fatal shooting involving an officer -- the first in Bailey’s nearly 40 years with the sheriff’s office in which a citizen or suspect was killed -- the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation is handling the case. This much is undisputed: Sunday was the three-year anniversary of Holveck’s wife’s death. He had been her primary caregiver for many years before she died on Nov. 25, 2009, of multiple sclerosis.
Since his wife’s death, Holveck had been laid off from his job as a woodworker and had money problems. He drank a lot. He wanted to go back home to family in Colorado but couldn’t afford to leave. He was despondent and increasingly violent, Nightwine said.
On Sunday, he had gotten into the whiskey. He punched holes in the walls and fired shots with his .22-caliber gun both inside and outside the mobile home.
That apparently went on for hours, Bailey said, yet no one called authorities until just after 10 p.m. when a flurry of 911 calls came in.
“He was just going crazy by then,” Bailey said.
Pleasant Acres is a retirement community, intended for those 55 or older. It was unclear yesterday how Holveck was able to live there for the past six years.
A woman who lives several trailers away said Holveck and Nightwine argued frequently, but no one ever called for help because they didn’t want to get involved. The neighbor said she was afraid to give her name.
Bailey said his office had no record of serious calls to the address; court records showed a drunken-driving arrest and a misdemeanor charge of obstructing official business for Holveck in 2010.
Despite the violence, Nightwine said she never thought that Holveck would hurt her or her 6-year-old daughter. A neighbor eventually took the girl to her own home on Sunday night as the fighting escalated.
Nightwine said she and Holveck fought often, but she generally could talk him down. Not yesterday.
Copyright 2012 The Columbus Dispatch