Taking a break from regularly scheduled military stuff to bring you this wild ass story...Check this out from the
CALDWELL, Ohio — He lay in the woods for seven hours, with an elbow shattered by an assailant’s bullet.
Lost, covered in his own
blood and unsure if the men who hunted him were still nearby, a man from
South Carolina hid in the forested hills outside Caldwell until after
dark on Nov. 6. Deciding it was safe, he then made a painful 2-mile
journey to the nearest farmhouse to call for help.
Investigators say he was the lucky one.
On Tuesday, they found the body of a man buried in a shallow grave near the site where the other man was attacked.
By surviving his ordeal
two weeks ago in Noble County, the victim, whose name authorities
haven’t released, helped uncover an elaborate scheme by at least two men
to lure people with the promise of work from across the country to
Ohio. Authorities say the real plan was to rob and kill them.
Two suspects were taken into custody Wednesday after an investigation by a bevy of federal, state and county agencies.
The Akron Beacon-Journal
reported last night that the suspects are a 16-year-old Stow-Munroe
Falls High School student in Ohio and a 52-year-old Akron man. Their
names had not been released.
The adult was being held
in the Summit County Jail in Akron on multiple counts related to
prostitution, the newspaper said. His bond was set at $1 million.
The juvenile had not yet been charged.
Noble County Sheriff
Stephen Hannum said the investigation began when an officer was called
to a lonely farmhouse near Fulda, about 100 miles east of Columbus, on a
report of a man with a gunshot wound.
According to the victim:
He had come to Noble
County after responding to a Craigslist advertisement for a job on a
688-acre cattle farm. Because he would be living at the farm, he was
told to bring all of his belongings.
The victim met two men for
breakfast in Marietta and then followed them in his own vehicle to
Caldwell. He left his truck there, joining the men in their vehicle to
complete the trip to the farm. Instead, the men pulled over on Don
Warner Road, a gravel country path that winds through the hills on the
eastern edge of the county.
The men said they would
need to complete the trip on foot because the road ahead was impassable,
so the man and one of his assailants got out of the truck and began
walking through the woods. That’s when the man heard what he thought was
the sound of a gun being cocked.
He looked and saw the other man had a handgun pointed at his head.
The victim was able to
deflect the barrel and start running, but not before the other man shot
him in the elbow. The assailant continued shooting at the victim as he
ran, but the man was able to escape into the woods.
“He said he saw the house
all lit up and thought it looked like a friendly place,” said a woman
who answered the door yesterday at the residence where the man sought
help. She would not give her name because she said she was still shaken
by the incident.
Things like that just
don’t happen in this tiny community of about two dozen houses that
straddle Fulda Road near the almost 200-year-old St. Mary’s of the
Immaculate Conception Church.
She said the man rang the
doorbell and beat on the door until she answered, and that his shirt and
pants were covered in dried blood. The man told her what had happened
and said he was afraid the men were going to steal his truck and the
all-terrain vehicle and motorcycle that he had brought from South
Carolina.
The man was treated at the
house by paramedics and eventually taken to a hospital in Akron, where
he underwent reconstructive surgery on his arm.
Then, on Nov. 11, the
sheriff’s office received a call from a woman in Boston who was
concerned about her twin brother, who had gone missing after responding
to a similar ad. The brother, who lived in Florida, had last been seen
in Parkersburg, W.Va., on Oct. 22.
Hannum said his office
called in help from the FBI, the state’s Bureau of Criminal
Investigation, the U.S. Marshals Service and a laundry list of other
agencies to assist with the hunt.
On Monday, they found a
shallow grave that investigators think was intended for the man who
escaped on Nov. 6. On Tuesday, they found a second grave near the first,
only this time containing the body of a man they think was killed by
the same two assailants.
Authorities have not
identified the man yet or determined how he died. The Licking County
coroner’s office is handling the autopsy.
Hannum said yesterday that
there’s no evidence that there are more victims, but he would not rule
out that there could be more people involved in the scheme than the two
arrested.
The two suspects in the
case were arrested in Summit County. Hannum would say only that they
were not Noble County residents, but at least one was familiar with the
area. The land where the graves were dug is owned by a nearby coal mine
and often leased for hunting.
Hannum said authorities
think the motive was simple greed. Property belonging to the victims
already has been recovered by investigators.
Fred Alverson, spokesman
for the U.S. attorney’s office in Columbus, said that the FBI has been
assisting the Noble County sheriff’s office on the case.
“We’re reviewing the information provided by the FBI,” Alverson said.
Dispatch reporter Kathy Lynn Gray contributed to this story.
