Good morning all. Here’s some news today.
The Cameo Nightclub shooting started as a feud between two rival factions from Price Hill and Madisonville, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said yesterday in a news conference. Deters said that suspect Cornel Beckley was the first to begin firing into the crowd from an elevated location inside the club, according to multiple witnesses. Investigators say they found the weapon Beckley allegedly used, as well as another gun used by another suspect, Deondre Davis, who died of injuries sustained at the nightclub earlier this week. A third gun was also recovered, and investigators are looking into the possibility there was a third shooter.
• A woman from Mexico with a yearlong work permit expiring in July has been detained for deportation in Fairfield. Maribel Trujillo, a mother of four who hasn’t been accused of any crime, was arrested by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents near her home Wednesday and will be deported next week. Trujillo was picked up a decade ago during a raid at Fairfield’s Koch Foods plant, but remained in the country afterward. After recent advocacy from a local church, she was granted a work visa that should have kept her in the country legally until July. But in February, after President Donald Trump was elected, Trujillo was fitted with a GPS ankle monitor and told to arrange a flight back to Mexico by April. Trujillo bought the ticket, according to her pastor, and was slated to leave later this month. ICE agents didn’t ask about her pending flight, however, and she is currently being held at the Butler County jail.
• Basketball legend Oscar Robertson is wading into a controversy around a temporary venue for the University of Cincinnati women’s basketball team. UC’s women will be playing in a 1,000-seat high school gymnasium while the university’s arena undergoes a rehab. Meanwhile, the men’s team will play at Northern Kentucky University’s 9,000-seat BBT Arena. That’s caused some UC fans to cry foul, including former Bearcat Robertson.
“I think that it’s really difficult for the women to accept something like that, in this day and age,” Robertson told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “They should play the same night the men play, but instead of eight o’clock play at 6. Or play in the afternoon.”
• Check out this cool map of Cincinnati’s architecture, which was made by local Nathan Rooy. The map shows the ages of almost every building in the city and many other parts of Hamilton County via a color-coded system. Rooy made the map by pulling construction dates from public databases, though he also had to do more research for a couple thousand structures. The map shows almost 360,000 buildings, though some 5,000 are still missing dates.
• Recently crowned Ohio GOP Chair Jane Timken, who grew up in Clifton, rose from “most likely to succeed” at Walnut Hills High School to Harvard University to county magistrate, marrying into a wealthy, influential Republican family and becoming a prominent GOP donor and volunteer. But it was the rise of Trump that skyrocketed Timken into one of the most powerful positions in the country — the leader of the president’s party in one of the nation’s most politically important states. Her rise also says a lot about the state of the party and is worth reading about, even if it is in a soft-focus profile.
• A federal appeals court has said Ohio’s new lethal injection process is unconstitutional, putting yet another delay on the state’s efforts to resume executions. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court forbade the state’s use of midazolam, a sedative, in a three-drug cocktail after other drug cocktails Ohio has tried have also been outlawed. Those mixtures in the past have resulted in long, possibly painful executions.
• Finally, President Trump yesterday ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airbase that launched chemical attacks this week. The chemical attack killed 80 civilians. U.S. forces carried out the counter-strike last night, launching almost 60 Tomahawk missiles at Al Shayrat airfield targeting fighter jets, aircraft storage facilities, radar units and air defense systems, and ammunition and fuel stores. Trump has stayed very hands-off on the issue of Syria until this week, and in 2013 criticized then-President Barack Obama for considering similar strikes without congressional approval. The strikes have drawn praise from hawkish Republicans in Congress, but also stark criticism from both staunch anti-interventionist conservatives and an array of liberals.
