By Eric Lyttle
The Columbus Dispatch
NEWARK, Ohio — Steven Smith didn’t think much of it when he heard the first pop. He was busy serving the lunch crowd in his new restaurant.
Seconds later, however, when he heard pop, pop, pop, he knew this wasn’t just any noise. It was gunfire.
Smith, who just opened his Big Momma’s House of Chicken and Fish on N. 11th Street, directly across from Newark High School’s football stadium, on Friday, looked out his window. Straight across the bridge over Raccoon Creek, he saw one police officer sitting, obviously injured, on the ground less than 200 yards away.
That’s not all he saw.
“I looked up, and two other plainclothes detectives were pointing their guns right in this direction,” Smith said. “I had six or seven people in the dining room. I yelled, ‘Hey, they’re shooting! They’re shooting! Get away from the doors and the windows.’”
As Smith stepped out the front door of his restaurant, the man whom police were aiming at bolted across his parking lot and disappeared into the neighborhood.
Before the noon hour had expired, a Newark police officer had been shot and the suspect was clinging to life. He had been hit by a Newark detective’s vehicle during the chase.
The officer and the suspect were taken by helicopter from the high school’s White Field stadium to Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. The officer had been shot in his left arm; the injury wasn’t life-threatening. The suspect’s injuries were more serious. Neither was identified yesterday by Newark police.
Newark Police Chief Steven Sarver said the incident began when officers from the city’s special-operations group attempted to make an arrest using a warrant at 581/2 Union St. just after noon.
The man who lived there, described as in his 20s, recently had been released from federal prison, where he had served time for counterfeiting. He was suspected of printing phony bills again in the residence.
Attempting an arrest was considered to be “high risk,” said Sarver, because the man had vowed to police that he’d never go back to prison. As recently as October, the chief said, the man had communicated to officers that he knew he would one day die in a police shootout.
While officers were getting ready to approach the house, the man came outside and drove off.
“That changed the dynamics of everything,” Sarver said.
When several uniformed and plainclothes officers tried to box his car in to arrest him four blocks away, on 11th Street, the man jumped out of the car and fired a revolver at police, striking the one officer. He then ran across Smith’s parking lot.
Sarver said police fired at least three shots in return.
A short pursuit followed, and, as police closed in on W. Church Street, the man turned and pointed a gun at a plainclothes detective following in an unmarked SUV, Sarver said.
“The officer made the decision to strike the suspect, stopping a known threat using reasonable force,” Sarver said.
Copyright 2014 The Columbus Dispatch