Columbus police failed to seek evidence in officer's drunken fatal crash, documents show

Columbus police investigators failed to pursue evidence that may have resulted in more serious criminal charges against an off-duty police officer who fled the scene after a fatal drunken-driving crash, a Columbus Dispatch investigation has found.

The case stems from a crash in the early morning hours of April 20, 2022, on Morse Road near Walford Street on the city’s Northeast Side. Pedestrian Naimo Abdirahman, a 27-year-old Somali American mother of a one-year-old son, died.

Columbus police officer Demetris Ortega, a 19-year veteran of the force was indicted in April 2023 for misdemeanor drunken driving and fleeing the scene, a third-degree felony. He pleaded guilty to both counts last September, and Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Carl Aveni sentenced Ortega to eighteen months, which he is serving in a Toledo prison.

Ortega escaped more serious charges, including aggravated vehicular homicide, which is a second-degree felony when the driver under the influence of alcohol and carries a prison term of up to eight years, plus a lifelong license suspension. County prosecutors said they couldn't bring other charges because there was insufficient evidence to prove who was at fault for the crash. For example, if the victim had been jaywalking, Ortega would not have been legally at fault.

Abdirahaman's body was found in the area of an intersection with marked crosswalks and a 45-mph speed limit.

But the police investigators' case file, obtained by The Dispatch through a public records request, shows gaps that Brian Higgins, an independent expert and former Bergen County, New Jersey, police chief, called "really unusual and pretty suspicious." Higgins reviewed records The Dispatch obtained.

For example, investigators asked for security video footage at four businesses along Morse Road — including one nearly 500 feet away from the crash site — and came up empty. Yet there is no record that investigators ever asked the business closest to the crash site, La Mega Michoacana grocery store, which has cameras aimed at its parking lot and beyond to Morse Road.

Store owner Edgar Alcauter told The Dispatch he never looked at the footage before it was automatically deleted after 30 days, but he would have been willing to share it with the police had they asked for it.

Higgins said that the case file left other important questions unanswered, such as why there was extensive damage to Ortega's tire on the opposite side from the impact with Abdirahman, which he said could be a sign the vehicle hit the curb and left the roadway.

The case file also shows police realized within days that a narrative they initially publicized — that a woman was driving Ortega's car — was false, yet they never publicly corrected their news release before Ortega was indicted a year later.

“If I was (the investigators’) supervisor, … I’d have questions," said Higgins, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Sgt. Eric Moore, who heads Columbus police’s Accident Investigation Unit, declined to be interviewed or to allow the detective who managed the case, Joseph Fihe, to be interviewed, citing department policy.

Neither they nor the police department's media team responded to a list of detailed questions about the investigation.

The department placed Ortega on desk duty after the crash but continued to employ him until Oct. 4, 2023 — nearly a year and a half later. Ortega earned $104,710 in 2022 and $92,779 in 2023, according to official data.

Abdirahman’s father, Mahdi Jama, who is now raising his late daughter’s now 3-year-old son, said he felt Ortega’s punishment was too light.

“I couldn't even believe it, honestly. … Somebody kills your child and gets away with only one year and a half,” he told The Dispatch, speaking in Somali through an interpreter. “My daughter was treated as less value than roadkill.”

Ortega was speeding, never touched brake pedal during crash

According to the case file, Ortega spent about three hours before the crash drinking at Fitzwilly’s pub — a Northland-area establishment. Ortega had been temporarily relieved of duty after a previous drunken-driving crash in 2015, and he would later tell investigators he often "blacked out" at Fitzwilly's.

The pub's security camera showed Ortega walking unsteadily to his SUV and driving away, alone, at 2:21 a.m., according to the case file.

Around the same time that Ortega left Fitzwilly’s, Abdirahman was out for a walk in an area of Morse Road that investigators noted was lit by streetlights.

The victim’s younger brother, Mohamed Gala, described his sister as loving and kind.

“She was outgoing, the smartest person I knew,” said Gala, who works at the Somali Community Association of Ohio.

But Gala said his sister also faced mental health challenges and had recently relapsed into addiction. The Franklin County Coroner's autopsy report shows she had cocaine and fentanyl in her system at the time she died.

Ortega drove along Morse Road to the area of Walford Street and the crash — about three miles from Fitzwilly’s Pub — at 2:27 a.m., according to the vehicle’s data readout. He was going 56.5 mph — 11.5 mph over the speed limit — when suddenly, the vehicle slowed to 53 mph without Ortega touching the brake pedal. This was presumably due to the impact with Abdirahman, prosecutors said during Ortega's plea hearing.

Ortega continued without stopping. He arrived at his home at the Sunbury Apartment complex, off Sunbury Road on Columbus’ Northeast Side, around 10 minutes after the crash.

About four minutes later, police dispatchers received the first of two 911 calls from bystanders who found Abdirahman’s body.

Officers from Columbus police’s Accident Investigation Unit arrived at the scene around 2:45 a.m.

The investigators’ photographs of the scene show broken pieces of Ortega’s SUV’s grill on the edge of the roadway, as well as on the sidewalk and grass near a crosswalk and a bus stop. Abdirahman had been knocked out of her shoes and her body was dragged more than 100 feet before coming to rest by the curb. The coroner’s report indicated she died of blunt impact injuries to her head, neck and torso.

Report: Ortega asked colleagues if he had killed someone after crash

At 7:20 a.m., almost five hours after the crash, police received a 911 call from a resident at the Sunbury Apartments reporting a Kia Sorento with a badly damaged hood smeared with blood. It was missing a tire and haphazardly parked, case file photos show.

Dispatchers quickly searched the vehicle’s plate in a database, and at 7:22 a.m., they announced the owner’s name over the police radio: Demetris Ortega.

Accident Investigation Unit detectives arrived at the apartment complex with pieces of the vehicle found at the crash scene and they fit Ortega's SUV “like puzzle pieces,” according to the report.

Warrant records indicate the detectives impounded the vehicle and collected blood samples from the hood, which would later match Abdirahman. Those warrants indicate investigators were pursuing vehicular homicide charges at the time — but that charge was omitted from all future warrants in the case.

Ortega spoke over the phone that morning with colleagues who told him that his vehicle had been mentioned on the police radio in connection to a hit-and-run.

Ortega spontaneously asked one of those colleagues if he had killed anyone, according to an account in the police investigative file written later. The colleague deemed the question suspicious so he immediately reported it to his boss who would have been responsible for sharing it with the Accident Investigation Unit.

Yet there is no record in the case file that crash investigators tried to interview Ortega on the day of the crash (which he could have refused), nor did they seek a warrant for a blood, breath or other alcohol test from him (which he could not have refused).

The Accident Investigation Unit did not formally interview Ortega until nearly two months later, when he and Mark Collins — a Columbus attorney well-known as a defender of criminally accused police officers — voluntarily agreed to talk.

At that June 16 meeting, Ortega admitted to being drunk the night of the crash, estimating he had between eight and 14 drinks and that on an intoxication scale of 0 to 10, he was at nine. Because he was so drunk, Ortega said he could not remember anything about the drive home, case file records show.

Regarding the question Ortega asked Dyer the morning of the crash, Ortega claimed that he assumed someone was dead when he saw his boss outside his apartment with crash investigators — a sign the crash was serious.

A false narrative about a female driver

The day after the crash, Columbus police informed The Dispatch that Ortega had been placed on desk duty in connection with the incident. Four days later, Moore, the head of the Accident Investigation Unit, sent The Dispatch a news release, prepared by Fihe, claiming that the driver who hit Abdirahman was a woman. The release stated “the vehicle has been identified as a 2022 Kia Sorento” — the make and model of Ortega’s SUV.

According to the investigators' case file, the female-driver narrative came from two male bystanders whom investigators interviewed at the crash site. The bystanders, who did not witness the crash, had mistaken another bystander who stopped her car at the scene as the driver involved in the crash. Fihe wrote that he realized the female-driver narrative was false when he spoke with the female bystander, 11 days after the crash.

However, the Accident Investigation Unit never publicly corrected the narrative, which was repeated by multiple local news outlets. Abdirahman’s family said investigators never informed them about the error, and they were shocked by Ortega's indictment a year later.

“They should have corrected that communication as quickly as they found out it was wrong,” Higgins, the John Jay instructor, said. “When there is wrong information put out, it has to be corrected … because (if it’s not) you lose the trust of the public.”

No record that investigators looked into Ortega's tire damage

The case file also contains investigators' photographs showing Ortega's left driver's side tire blew out — on the opposite side of the vehicle from where the hood was badly dented and Abdirahman’s blood was collected.

Higgins said he did not think the tire damage could have come from the vehicle’s impact with Abdirahman’s body.

“I find it unusual that they didn't address where the damage to the vehicle came from that was not from the victim,” he said. “… I think his vehicle hit the curb there — that's how the tire blew out.”

Along with the discovery of broken pieces of Ortega’s SUV along the edge of the road and the sidewalk, Higgins said the tire damage could be evidence that Ortega left the roadway during the crash.

Yet the text of the case file that investigators shared with prosecutors makes no mention of the blown-out tire, nor any investigation of a possible cause.

No indictment for vehicular homicide

The case file shows investigators recommended only two charges against Ortega: misdemeanor drunken driving and felony hit-skip, the same charges that the grand jury eventually indicted him for a year after the crash.

Prosecutors do not necessarily have to follow police recommendations when bringing cases before grand juries, though they often do. Grand jury proceedings in Ohio are conducted in private, and the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office declined to say whether the grand jury that indicted Ortega ever considered other charges, citing that privacy.

But Franklin County Assistant Prosecutor Jeff Zezech, who handled the case, told The Dispatch that evidence was lacking for that charge.

"Because of the nature of the scene, the lack of any video, the lack of any witnesses and the placement of all of the physical evidence ... we could not say — and nobody could say — who was at fault," Zezech said after Ortega's plea hearing in September.

Under Ohio law, vehicular homicide and aggravated vehicular homicide require demonstrating that a driver’s drunkenness, recklessness or negligence were the “proximate cause” — generally defined as the primary cause — for a crash.

Stephen Palmer, a Columbus-based attorney who often represents drunk-driving defendants, said that without videos or eyewitnesses, the defense could have argued that neither Ortega’s drinking nor his driving was the primary cause of the crash.

“Given the cards the prosecutor were dealt, the outcome doesn't surprise me that much,” said Palmer, who was not involved in Ortega’s case.

But Higgins said that there seemed to be enough evidence in the case file for prosecutors to bring charges against Ortega for causing the crash. He cited the facts that Ortega was speeding, that his foot never touched the brake pedal and that he admitted being black-out drunk.

“That they couldn't determine a contributing factor (in the crash) doesn't seem plausible, quite frankly,” Higgins said.

Jama, Abdirahman’s father, told The Dispatch he did not believe police conducted a fair investigation. The family has a pending civil case against Ortega and Fitzwilly’s Pub.

Gala, the victim’s brother, said the only solace he can find was that Abdirahman's death occurred during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in 2022.

“In the Quran, it says if somebody dies in the last 10 days (of Ramadan), you go straight to heaven,” he said. “I think God just wanted her closer to him.”

Peter Gill covers immigration, New American communities and religion for the Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America at:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.

pgill@dispatch.com

@pitaarj

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus police didn't seek evidence in officer's drunken fatal crash