Dayton shooting: How newspaper staff covered fateful night
DAYTON — When Anthony Shoemaker and Amelia Robinson pulled into their driveway on Green Street after a night out, it was just past 1 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 4, 2019.
Both work for the Dayton Daily News. Amelia covered the police beat years ago but serves as the editorial page editor now. Anthony manages the copy desk and the newspaper's print production.
They had been at a friend’s birthday party. Normally, during a night out, they would drive down 5th Street — the center of Dayton's Oregon District entertainment and arts area — to see what was going on.
But that night they drove straight home.
Temporary face tattoos covered Amelia’s cheeks. She had joked on Facebook about getting a face tattoo and it became a running gag. So, earlier in the day when they went to a tattoo-themed fundraiser for a local arts organization, she allowed a child — with the help of a tattoo artist — to put tattoos all over her face.
There was a pause after Anthony turned the ignition off.
And then they heard gunshots.
That sounds like an AK-47, Amelia thought.
Before she could get the words out, they heard more shots. That sounded like a 9mm gun.
Are police returning fire?
The shots were so loud Anthony and Amelia at first thought it was coming from their street. They bolted into the house and hid in the stairwell.
Listening further, they realized the shots were coming from the Oregon District two blocks north.
Should they go check? Anthony thought they should wait to make sure the gunfire was done.
They called the newsroom — no answer.
It seemed like an eternity, but it was only 20 minutes before impulse and concern for friends and neighbors led them to grab a camera and head for 5th Street.
An officer warned them to turn around. “Don’t cross that line,” he said.
“Oh, no, we live this way,” Amelia said, barreling past.
When they got to 5th Street, bodies were on the pavement.
In front of the hat shop, BRIM, Anthony saw a woman’s body, later identified as Lois Oglesby, her cellphone in hand.
He later read that Oglesby spent her dying moments calling her children’s father, begging him to take care of their kids and telling him she loved him.
“That’s the story that haunts me the most,” Anthony said months later.
But on Aug. 4 there wasn’t time to think.
The couple crossed 5th Street toward the back of Ned Peppers Bar and The Hole in the Wall.
Dozens of shoes lay abandoned just beyond the fence behind the patio at Ned Peppers — flip-flops, sneakers, sandals.
They just ran out of their shoes, Anthony thought. They must have fallen off as people jumped the bar’s fence while running away.
Amelia took a picture.
The couple had a friend on the police force. Amelia kept calling the officer, trying to confirm the number of fatalities.
Anthony saw that WHIO (Dayton’s CBS affiliate, which used to share a newsroom and owner with the Dayton Daily News) was broadcasting in a parking lot across from the Dublin Pub.
WHIO reporter Monica Castro was preparing to go on camera when Amelia’s police source told her off the record that 10 people had died, including the shooter.
“I’ve got something!” Amelia yelled.
Castro pulled her on the air.
“There are several people who are unfortunately gone,” Amelia said.
For several hours, Anthony and Amelia tried to confirm the number of fatalities on the record.
They had so many questions.
Who died? Who was the shooter? How did this happen? Why?
Amelia got the number of dead confirmed. At 3:19 a.m., she tweeted her photo of the shoes.
“These are the shoes people lost when they ran for their lives in Dayton. They were the lucky ones,” she wrote. “At least 10 dead in Ohio.”
They spent the next two hours making calls, sending photos to the office and searching for eyewitnesses.
A bartender from Blind Bob’s — a bar across the street from Ned Peppers — shouted at Amelia, “Hey, nobody wants you here right now.”
“Hey, it’s my job,” she said.
The bartender wasn’t in the mood to listen. He, the doorman and the waitresses had spent their night helping victims, using shirts, towels and anything they could to stop people from bleeding to death.
Anthony and Amelia finally left the Oregon District around 5:30 a.m. and forced themselves to sleep.
Before they crawled into bed, Anthony noticed that Amelia was still sporting smudged tattoos from the art festival.
“You still have all that shit on your face,” he said with a small smile.
“What?!” she asked. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you let me go on the air like that.”
A gunman in the entertainment district
Dayton is a gritty city, and the Oregon District is its living room.
At least, that’s how Anthony sees it.
So when Connor Betts shot and killed nine people, including his sibling, before being shot to death by Dayton police, people wanted answers.
“It’s human instinct to want a motive,” Anthony explained.
Dayton was being kicked — once again — while it was already down.
Two months before the shooting, the city shelled out $650,000 to provide security in preparation for a KKK rally on May 25, 2019. A small group of white supremacists showed up, drowned out by 500-600 protesters.
Two days later, 15 tornadoes tore through the Miami Valley. Four hit Montgomery County, decimating parts of nearby Trotwood, Brookville and Riverside as well as part of Dayton.
In November 2019, the Daily News reported that property values for the county had dropped $46.3 million dollars due to the storms. It was one of the biggest disasters to hit Dayton in 100 years.
And then Betts, a 24-year-old from Bellbrook, 20 minutes southeast of Dayton, rocked the city again.
Thirteen hours after a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that killed 22 people and injured 24 others, Betts cut through the alley that separates Blind Bob’s from an apartment building.
He ignored the late-night customers on the bar’s patio, walked past a taco truck on 5th Street and opened fire.
Armed with a .223 high-capacity rifle and a 100-round magazine of ammunition, Betts shot in all directions. Then he charged Ned Peppers Bar across the street.
He wore a mask, ear protection and a ballistic vest. As Betts made his way across the street, a cocktail of cocaine, Xanax and alcohol coursed through his system.
A sergeant and five officers from the Dayton police responded immediately, gunning down Betts 32 seconds after he began shooting. Their actions were crucial, Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said the day after the shooting.
Still, nine people were killed: Lois L. Oglesby, 27; Saeed Saleh, 38; Derrick R. Fudge, 57; Logan M. Turner, 30; Nicholas P. Cumer, 25; Thomas J. McNichols, 25; Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis, 36; Monica E. Brickhouse, 39; and the shooter’s sister, 22-year-old Megan Betts.
Pressing on ...
Ty Greenlees, the chief and only photographer for the Daily News as a result of downsizing, was preoccupied with his own thoughts when Ben McLaughlin, the breaking news and digital content editor, called at 5:50 a.m. that Sunday.
“Hey — there’s been a mass shooting in the Oregon District,” McLaughlin told him. “Nine dead, plus the shooter. I need you to get there right now.”
After taking a minute to process, Ty gathered his equipment and left his old house in Wilmington and made the 40-minute drive to Dayton.
He navigated through the district’s side streets, stopping to ask reporter colleagues which alleyways were open.
That’s when Ty saw the bright yellow tags for the bullet casings dotting 5th Street. Ninety-two tags … that’s just absolutely horrific, he thought.
Ty pressed on. He started his process: go to a spot, shoot photos, select ones to keep, then load them onto his phone with a lightning cable.
At noon, he headed to the first prayer vigil, at Levitt Pavilion in downtown Dayton.
As the sun beat down on the pavilion, Ty made his first portrait of a man playing the trombone.
He cried throughout the day.
'You can't do all of those things well.'
Three weeks later, Ty quit the Daily News to take a job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
After covering the tornadoes and the shooting last summer he couldn’t bear witnessing more mass destruction.
“I just wanted to crawl in a hole and not talk to anybody,” he said.
Ty had been with the Daily News since he was 18. Back then, he had 10 photographer mentors and journalism was a different industry.
At 53, he was at least 10 years away from retiring.
“It was painful to leave,” he said.
Now he works in Wright-Patterson’s public affairs office, photographing life at the base.
Does he miss his old job? “Every day.”
He said the shooting wasn’t a factor in his decision to leave the Daily News. It was a personal thing — family issues.
In addition to his own crises, he was expected to do more with fewer resources. By training and experience, he’s a photographer. But over the last decade, as staff dwindled and the business changed, he had to learn how to shoot and edit video; pilot a drone; even start writing.
“But you can’t do all of those things well.”
So he felt like he had to leave. But he also felt horrible about it.
“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had cake in that newsroom for people who have left,” he said.
Reflecting on a 'trio of nightmares'
After the El Paso shooting last summer, the Walmart closed. But restaurants and shops in the Oregon District reopened by nightfall on the day of the shooting.
The Oregon District was making a resurgence, Ty explained in an interview last month. Before the pandemic swept the country. Before George Floyd died and Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Dayton.
Now, several businesses in the Oregon District have permanently closed due to the pandemic.
Amelia and Anthony said they can’t believe it’s been a year since the shootings.
“It’s been like one long day,” Amelia said.
“It’s a different kind of awful,” Anthony added. “The tornadoes ruined people’s homes. Then you have the shooting. Then on top of it you have hundreds of people in the area killed from coronavirus. It’s just, like, a constant ‘What’s gonna happen next?’”
Neither have stopped working for more than a long weekend or two in the last year.
“I really feel like since the tornadoes we’ve been constantly working … everything just feels like a constant cloud,” Anthony said.
That cloud stretches all the way back to the first few hours after the shooting, when Anthony came across Lois Oglesby’s body.
“When I edit stories for the newspaper about the shooting, sometimes I will get to her name and it sticks out to me differently because I was so close to her body,” he said. “... It’s just an image I can’t get out of my head.”
Amelia said she can’t begin to imagine the victims’ families’ anguish.
“You can’t even embrace each other right now,” she said. “The mental agony. [The virus] has compounded things, back-to-back-to-back-to-back.”
For Ty, the pandemic gets a third-place ranking in the trio of nightmares to strike Dayton in the last year.
“You can protect yourself against the virus,” he said. “There’s not necessarily ways to keep yourself from being killed by a tornado or by a mentally unstable person shooting people up at a bar.”
cdoyle@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Dayton shooting: How newspaper staff covered fateful night
