Driver fatally shot by Blendon Township police outside Kroger store on Sunbury Road
Blendon Township police fatally shot a driver Thursday evening in the parking lot at the Kroger store on Sunbury Road near Westerville, the police chief and a spokesperson for the Ohio Attorney General's Office confirmed to The Dispatch.
Blendon Township police Chief John Belford confirmed late Thursday night that at 6:24 p.m. Thursday, township police officers responded to an undisclosed incident in the parking lot at the grocery store at 5991 S. Sunbury Road just north of Route 161 in the Sunbury Plaza. As a result, he said, one person was shot and killed.
Belford referred all other questions to the Ohio Attorney General's Office, where spokesman Steve Irwin earlier told The Dispatch that the wounded person was transported in serious condition to a nearby hospital, then later confirmed the driver died.
No one else was injured, Irwin said.
Blendon Township police requested the attorney general's Bureau of Criminal Investigation conduct an outside investigation of the shooting, Irwin said. Columbus police and many other law enforcement agencies do the same thing when one of their officers kills or injures someone in a shooting.
A heavy police response was visible around 6:30 p.m. in the parking lot outside the grocery store. Crime scene tape was placed around a section of the sidewalk and parking lot near the walk-up pharmacy window, and access points to the grocery store lot were blocked.
The shooting reportedly involved the driver of a car that ultimately jumped the curb onto a sidewalk near the walk-up pharmacy window and struck an exterior wall and/or a support column.
The driver's side door of the black, four-door sedan was open at the scene. Just outside the vehicle on the yellow-painted curb there was a substantial amount of blood, indicating the shooting took place in that area. Medical treatment materials remained strewn on the ground by the blood.
Details about the person shot, what happened to lead to the shooting, and other information were not released by authorities Thursday night.
An Ohio BCI crime scene unit and a Columbus Division of Police mobile substation were on scene in the parking lot, along with law enforcement officers from other agencies, including Westerville, Columbus and the Franklin County Sheriff's Office.
In January, a 24-year-old woman was shot and killed in the same Sunbury Plaza parking lot.
The Blendon Township shooting was the second fatal police-involved shooting in Franklin County in 24 hours. Columbus police said one officer fatally shot a man who was reported by police to be running on foot with a gun from officers in the Innis Garden Village neighborhood on the South Side.
The man, who was identified Thursday afternoon by Columbus police as Jamie Oversight, 36, of Worthington, had fled by vehicle and then on foot from Columbus police trying to arrest him for again violating a protection order by appearing at the home of a South Side resident.
cbehrens@dispatch.com
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Driver shot by Blendon Township police outside Kroger on Sunbury Road
