Police describe shooting response

MARION - The 911 calls were as chaotic as the scene they described. The first three all came in the same minute – 1:31 a.m.

A patron was the first to call, taking cover in a corner.

"I'm at Dino's Bar and Grill in Marion and gunshots are going off ... somebody's shot, laying on the floor,” she said. She didn’t know of any other injuries, but faint screams and curses could be heard in the background.

The dispatcher asked how many shots were fired — “Six, eight, I don’t know, I don’t know… I just wandered here, I’ve been here all of 10 minutes.”

Forty seconds later, the bartender was calling from the kitchen.

“At Dino’s Restaurant, someone was just shot, we need an ambulance and cops,” he said, then “I hear more gunshots outside,” and a curse. The shots could be heard over the phone.

In the same second as the bartender's call came number three — a report of four to five shots fired behind Dino’s.

“It didn't sound like a very big gun, it was just the pops, it didn't sound like much but there were shots fired,” the caller said. He’d seen a group running toward a gold vehicle as he drove by, and as the gold car backed up, shots were fired.

Dispatchers received calls about multiple vehicles, described differently — there was a gold Dodge Intrepid from the caller driving past, who then reported a red Monte Carlo behind him.

Another caller said there were both gray and red Monte Carlos, and the red one received gunfire.

“I think it was two girls that got in the car that he shot, but I didn’t see anybody else,” this caller said. She was calling from a nearby apartment and had been asleep until the shots woke her.

Another caller, to the south of Dino's Bar, said they'd heard "five big bangs" coming from a few houses north that they thought were gunshots.

After police arrived, a woman by Speedway said she’d seen a black male, not carrying anything, in a red hoodie running in an alley between Davids Street and Henry Street, toward Congress Street. A different caller said he saw a white or Hispanic male in a black and white windbreaker running from police from Columbia Street onto Blaine Avenue, with a bag in his hand.

An ambulance was dispatched, on orders to stage away from the scene until police secured it. They found James Burton III had suffered multiple gunshot wounds inside the bar.

The victim

James Burton III had only been in Dino’s Bar and Grill for six minutes before the start of the fight that led to his fatal shooting.

His Nov. 16 death was Marion County's first homicide of 2015.

Burton, 26, had come to Marion from Cleveland to visit family, Lt. Chris Adkins said. Marion police did not have any information connecting him to any criminal activity.

“He actually got here hours before he was shot,” Adkins said.

Around two weeks previously, there had been an incident between two groups at the bar, Adkins said, and people involved in that incident might have been connected to Burton and Ronnie Farley Jr.

Farley is originally from Detroit and has spent several years in Marion. He has a lengthy criminal record here, including narcotics and weapons charges.

“Just by association of knowing the same people, I believe that’s what led (to the shooting),” Adkins said. “I wouldn’t say (they were) an organized gang, just a group of individuals that identify their selves as being from Cleveland or identify their selves as being from Detroit.”

It was the latest fatal shooting in Marion that was tied to issues beyond the city, a list that Chief Bill Collins said has grown over the years. He could think of four or five such cases offhand, none of which involved Marion natives. Last year, a Toledo resident shot and wounded two people outside Dino's Bar.

“Ninety-five percent of the violent crime that we have here usually is produced by people that don’t live in Marion,” he said.

The fight began between Farley and Burton, Collins said, but the video of the altercation did not make it clear who or how it began, as loud music drowned out any words spoken. It soon became an all-out brawl, with at least 10, maybe up to 20 patrons — most of those present in the bar — involved.

“They were hitting each other with pool balls,” Collins said.

Then after the fight, the shooting — just two minutes before police arrived.

“People were trying to leave, we’re trying to keep people there to get witness statements … people yelling and screaming, ‘We have a guy that’s shot,’” Collins said.

After the fight ended, police allege, Farley had shot Burton repeatedly before leaving in a vehicle with one other person. As they drove away, Ortavious Hood, described as a friend of Burton, allegedly fired multiple shots at the vehicle, hitting it at least twice.

The investigation

In the initial chaos, investigators didn’t even realize there had been a second shooter, as those involved from either side weren’t being very forthcoming, but they were able to keep everyone in place.

“The patrol officers that responded to the scene and then the detectives that were called in to process the scene … they did a great job,” Collins said.

Identifying a suspect required review of multiple videos, including the bar’s surveillance footage —which captured the fight and Burton’s shooting — and officer body cameras, which captured the aftermath and witness reactions.

Dino’s staff also was very cooperative, Collins said, as they didn’t want these crimes happening there any more than he did. A call to Dino's owner's office was not returned.

Detectives quickly identified Farley as a suspect and tracked him to Detroit and worked with the U.S. Marshals to arrest him within 12 hours of the shooting, though Collins and Adkins declined to comment on how exactly he was tracked.

Upon seizing the vehicle he left in, bullet holes were identified, leading them to search for Hood next.

“Upon further review, that’s where we found more shots were fired and who we were looking for,” Collins said.

By the afternoon of Nov. 20, Hood, 19, was arrested on charges of felonious assault and possessing weapons under disability.

Two firearms have been recovered in connection with the case and are undergoing ballistics tests to match them to the shootings.

Collins said the initial investigation indicates both Farley and Hood had firearms with them in the bar. He and Adkins said there were around 20 people in the bar at the time of the shooting and almost all have been identified.

Re-establishing calm

Even with Farley and Hood in custody, Collins and his officers still had to increase their efforts, not only in general bar patrols but specifically in keeping the peace between the sides involved.

After it all happened, Collins said, there were rumors of retaliation.

“We’ve actually reached out and talked to family members on both sides and tried to quash that,” Collins said.

Those efforts, and heightened walk-through efforts, paid off with no major incidents in the weekend that followed.

“We’ve made ourselves very visible, in that bar in particular but also the other uptown bars that are normally busy,” Collins said.

These kinds of bar checks are common, and so are police calls about more minor incidents.

“It’s a common occurrence on the weekend,” Collins said "That’s why we try to do the bar walk-throughs when call load and time permits.”

In these walk-throughs, officers try to separate any troublemakers in a crowd to prevent larger incidents, and make it clear that they are nearby to have a pre-emptive effect.

So far, it’s been working again.

shickey@marionstar.com

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Twitter: @SpenserHickey