Blood in the street
Columbus police once again prove unwilling or unable to investigate crimes committed by their colleagues.
If there is one thing to learn from The Rooster, it’s that the best way to escape serious consequences for killing a stranger is to do the deed with your personal motor vehicle.
The second biggest lesson is the cops lie. Repeatedly. And oftentimes, otherwise well-intentioned reporters will go along with their fables due to the respect our society inherently pays towards the so-called Thin Blue Line. That deference is mispplaced at best.
These two ultimate truths collided in the case of 22-year Columbus Division of Police veteran Demetris Ortega, who, after previously being suspended for drunken driving, got blacked out in April 2022 at some shitheel suburban bar before killing 30-year-old Naimo Abdirahman as she walked across Morse Road in a well-lit crosswalk.
A Franklin County judge sentenced Ortega to 18 months in prison, a sentence which he’s currently serving near Toledo.
Eighteen months in the clink is a lot longer than most people would think. And it’s doubtful that Ortega is having a lot of fun, especially given the previous drunken life he had before.
But Ortega, who was initially suspended for refusing to cooperate with the investigation into the death of a young woman, can thank his former colleagues that his stay in prison won’t be much longer.
From Peter Gill of dispatch.com:
But the police investigators' case file, obtained by The Dispatch through a public records request, shows gaps that Brian Higgins, an independent expert and former Bergen County, New Jersey, police chief, called "really unusual and pretty suspicious." Higgins reviewed records The Dispatch obtained.
For example, investigators asked for security video footage at four businesses along Morse Road — including one nearly 500 feet away from the crash site — and came up empty. Yet there is no record that investigators ever asked the business closest to the crash site, La Mega Michoacana grocery store, which has cameras aimed at its parking lot and beyond to Morse Road.
[…]
Higgins said that the case file left other important questions unanswered, such as why there was extensive damage to Ortega's tire on the opposite side from the impact with Abdirahman, which he said could be a sign the vehicle hit the curb and left the roadway.
The case file also shows police realized within days that a narrative they initially publicized — that a woman was driving Ortega's car — was false, yet they never publicly corrected their news release before Ortega was indicted a year later.
I’m not surprised the Columbus Division of Police never corrected the press release in which the organization claimed that a woman was driving Ortega at the time of the fatal crash, which meant that, at best, one of their sworn officers had left the scene of a fatal accident and the killer went free for over a year.
I am a little surprised The Dispatch never got around to correcting its reporting on the crash. It basically regurgitated the initial police report and passed it off as fact to its readers.
The Dispatch did note, in the second to last paragraph of a November 2023 article about Ortega’s sentencing, the police “erroneously reported” that a woman was driving Ortega’s car at the time of the crash.
If only there were an institution in Columbus tasked with fact-checking the powerful! But I digress.
I mentioned these two specific passages as recently as September 2023, but they are indicative of how the local newspaper of record covers crimes committed by the so-called Thin Blue Line.
From Bethany Bruner of dispatch.com on April 21, 2022 (emphasis mine):
Officer Demetris Ortega, a 20-year veteran of the Columbus Division of Police, is the registered owner of the vehicle involved in the crash reported at 2:41 a.m. near the intersection of Morse Road and Walford street on the city's Northeast Side, sources told The Dispatch.
However, Ortega was a passenger and not the driver of the vehicle involved, one of the sources said.
Columbus police said a woman who was on foot was struck by the vehicle. She was pronounced dead at 2:49 a.m. Wednesday. Her name has not yet been released, pending notification of her family. A Columbus police crash report was still not available Thursday.
Not even 24 hours after the crash, the Columbus Division of Police was already pushing the narrative that Ortega wasn’t the driver. If a source lied like that to me, I would burn their ass—no questions asked. But I’m built different.
There was apparently no follow-up to the obvious question: Why didn’t an officer sworn to serve and protect Columbus report the driver to his colleagues?
Five days after the crash, the Columbus Division of Police were once again pushing the narrative that Ortega wasn’t driving. In fact, they even sprinkled in a tidbit about how he was “distraught” at the wreck before a woman drove him away from the scene.
From Cole Behrens of dispatch.com on April 25th, 2022 (emphasis mine):
However, Ortega was off-duty and a passenger in the vehicle and was not driving at the time of the crash, a source told the newspaper.
Ortega has not been charged with any crime related to the crash. No crash report had been filed by police as of Monday evening.
But according to a press release issued Monday, police responded around 2:40 a.m. Wednesday to a report that Abdirahman was attempting to cross Morse Road when she was struck by an eastbound vehicle.
The female driver of the vehicle briefly stopped, and a male passenger got out to check the condition of Abdirahman. The male "appeared distraught" and reportedly told the witnesses to call the police, the release states.
The female driver continued eastbound on Morse after the man got out, then she turned onto Malin Street and returned westbound on a service road that runs in front of businesses on the south side of the road, parallel to eastbound Morse Road. She picked up the male passenger, and the pair then fled the scene, police said.
Again! This is presented as fact. There is zero pushback against any of the police narratives. Their side is simply regurgitated verbatim to their readers.
Well, almost three years to the day later, we now know what actually happened: Ortega got overserved at Fitzwilly’s Pub on Dublin Granville Road, where security cameras caught him staggering to his car alone shortly before the crash.
From Katie Geniusz of wosu.org in September 2023 (brackets mine):
In footage obtained from the pub, Ortega is seen drinking multiple beers and shots, and is later seen “visibly stumbling” while walking to his car. According to data from Ortega’s SUV, the vehicle was traveling between 51 and 56 mph in a 45 mph limit zone. The data also showed the vehicle slowing from 56 mph to 53 mph, without slowing at the crash site and continuing to where the vehicle was later found, [Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Jeff] Zezech said.
Zezech also said that due to the five-hour gap between the crash and when the vehicle was found, a field sobriety test or blood test was not possible. Zezech said that during an interview with Ortega, he admitted to “blacking out” from drinking the night of the crash and "self-rated his intoxication at a nine out of 10."
It’s worth asking why the Columbus police felt confident in pushing the narrative that Ortega was merely the passenger of the fatal crash in the first place.
This wasn’t some one-off, ham-fisted quip at a press conference. It was officially published by the Division and repeatedly spun to friendly local reporters.
That narrative obviously went out of the window as soon as investigators obtained footage of Ortega, who, again, had already been suspended for drunk driving, stumbling to his SUV alone after drinking “several” beers and shots.
But I guess, in retrospect, it’s somewhat amazing that local investigators even thought to check the bar’s surveillance in the first place, given that they apparently had no interest in properly investigating the crash site.
It’s coincidental, at the very least, investigators never pulled surveillance footage from the store closest to the wreck to obtain the evidence needed to send Ortega along for a lot longer than 1.5 years.
There should be a federal investigation into how that happened. I’d say there should be a state investigation, but why waste the money? We’re still waiting for the Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s report on the mass shooting in the Short North last year in which all the victims were almost undoubtedly shot by police officers responding to a false report of a shooting.
I have yet to see a statement from Mayor Andy Ginther or anyone on the City Council about the explosive report in which local investigators were either incompetent or criminally liable for allowing a drunken pissant to escape the consequences of his actions.
And I write that as somebody who was no stranger to drunk driving myself during my alcoholic days. But had I killed an innocent pedestrian like Ortega did, I would at least had the decency to kill myself and save the Ohio public the expense of a trial and incarceration, which no doubt would have been much longer than Ortega’s.
The best for which we can hope is local legacy media outlets finally come to their senses when covering the police, especially when one of their own is accused of criminal wrongdoing. We might be better off hoping for bullet trains to Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Until then, it’d at least be nice to see Mayor Suburbs or someone on the city council publish a sternly worded statement on social media. Such discussions are undoubtedly happening behind closed doors, as is The Columbus Way, but maybe I’m asking too much for one of them to show they have a modicum of anger about the farce of an investigation.
A young mother is dead! The cop was an unrepentant drunken asshole (not that I’d know anything about that myself), and his crooked colleagues tried to cover for his ass all the way until they couldn’t. And even then, their incompetence or criminal negligence earned Ortega only half of the maximum sentence for the drunken slaughter of a mother with a one-year-old daughter.
If this manslaughter had happened in any other way than behind a car, it’d probably be a different kind of story. Same if Ms. Abdirahman had been born in Upper Arlington or Bexley.
Instead, it was a drunken cop behind the wheel and a dead brown immigrant in the road. That the result isn’t shocking doesn’t make it any less disgusting.