Ohio Weekly News Recap: The Columbus Dispatch’s Top Headlines
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The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office continues to search for a gunman who shot and killed a man in the parking lot of a Home Depot store in Prairie Township last Friday night.
The sheriff’s office received a call at 8:56 p.m. on Friday, August 23, in the parking lot of the Home Depot at 100 S. Grener Ave in Prairie Township. According to a search warrant obtained by the sheriff’s office, the caller told dispatchers that his friend, Javier Roberto Ventura Sanchez, 20, had been shot.
When officers arrived on scene, they found Sanchez with a gunshot wound to the chest, the warrant states. Paramedics from the Prairie Township Fire Department arrived and took Sanchez to OhioHealth Doctor’s Hospital in the Columbus Lincoln Village area, where he was pronounced dead at 9:45 p.m.
Through their initial investigation, detectives determined that the suspect who shot Sanchez was driving a gray 2003 Dodge Ram 1500 when they fled the scene. The next day, Saturday, Aug. 24, a truck matching that description was found unoccupied in the 3900 block of East Broad Street in Whitehall, the search warrant states.
The sheriff’s office seized the vehicle and found six .22 caliber rifle cartridges and one rifle cartridge containing bullets of the same caliber. Information about a suspect has not been released by the sheriff’s office.
Sanchez leaves behind his parents, Nicolas Ventura and Belen Sanchez, his sisters Neli, Nancy and Maria, and his brother Abelardo, as well as numerous other family members and friends, according to his obituary published by the Jerry Spears Funeral Home of Hilliard.
A funeral mass for Sanchez will be held at 10:30 a.m. Friday, August 30, at Our Lady of Guadelupe, 143 E. Patterson Ave. in Columbus, with burial following at Galloway Cemetery.
@ShahidMeighan
