Tony Gordon wasn't the first, nor will he be the last
Cincinnati Enquirer
08/29/2003
Madisonville man killed over his custom rims, prosecutor says
Timothy Powell Jr. loved his white 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass, spending hours dressing it up with racing flag decals and $4,000 of 20-inch gold custom rims.
Jerome Brown and six of his friends also loved it, Hamilton County prosecutors say. So much so that Brown, 19, is accused of rounding up his buddies in Dayton, Ohio, and driving to Cincinnati, casing Powell's car in the Club Ritz parking lot and following him to Madisonville, where police say Brown killed him.
"It was a flashy car and it had fancy gold rims that attracted attention," Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Brad Greenberg said during Brown's aggravated murder trial in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court this week. "Unfortunately the night of Sept. 17, 2001, it attracted the wrong type of attention."
Brown has denied the robbery and killing.
Othello Harrell, one of Brown's accomplices, accepted a plea deal in the case and is spending 12 years in prison. In testimony at Brown's trial, he detailed how his friend was the gang leader and the ruthless shooter who killed Powell for his car.
Powell had just dropped off friends Madisonville in the early morning hours of Sept. 17, 2001, when the gang hemmed in his vehicle with three of their own.
Desperately, Powell put his car in reverse in a vain attempt to escape. He avoided crashing into one of the gang's cars but was confronted by Harrell and Brown and another gang member, all of them flashing guns.
"Dude tried to back up," Harrell said of Powell. "(We) tried to block him in.
"(Brown) was shooting. The driver wouldn't stop, so Heddy was just busting it (shooting)."
Sparkling, spinning and other high-end tire rims for cars and trucks increasingly have become a target for thieves, which have led to assaults and occasionally death in Ohio.
While it remains relatively rare for violence to erupt over custom car wheels in Cincinnati, police elsewhere have seen a spate of violence this year connected with the expensive accessory. James "Tony" Gordon, 27, was shot to death in Dayton, Ohio, three weeks ago by a man who commented about the rims on his 1987 Ford Thunderbird at an intersection, police said. No arrests have been made.
Click here to read the entire story in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Click here to read "Shooting detailed at murder trial" in the Cincinnati Post.
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