Saturday, April 08, 2000
Murder suspect ends standoff
BY SHEILA McLAUGHLIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
LEBANON — Jeffrey Daniel Bornhoeft had a history of threatening his ex-wife with a gun, police said. On Friday morning, police say, he turned a long-barrelled revolver on her new husband and shot him dead.
Shortly after noon, after a tense three-hour standoff in the parking lot of American Village Apartments on Georgetown Drive, Mr. Bornhoeft laid down the gun he had pressed against the bottom of his chin and surrendered to police.
Police said he admitted to the killing, but they weren't sure why it happened.
The 30-year-old Mason father of three — convicted of assault last year for holding his wife at gunpoint — is charged with aggravated murder in the slaying of James Leonard Johnson.
Mr. Bornhoeft was ordered held at the Warren County Jail without bond after an arraignment hearing in Lebanon Municipal Court. Judge Mark Bo gen said he refused to set bond because he feared Mr. Bornhoeft might try to harm himself.
Police said Mr. Johnson, who recently married Mr. Bornhoeft's ex-wife, Shawn, was shot in the back of the head as he apparently lay sleeping in the apartment. Mr. Johnson, 23, was a construction worker and lived there with Shawn Johnson and her children from her marriage to Mr. Bornhoeft.
“He kept saying, "I'll kill myself. I don't want to go back to jail,'” Lebanon Police Chief Ken Burns said, describing the scene in the parking lot while reporters were kept at a safe distance.
Police were called to the residence after Mr. Bornhoeft phoned Mrs. Johnson at work in Sharonville around 9 a.m.
Hysterical, Mrs. Johnson told co-workers that someone was shot at her apartment. They called 911 while they attempted to calm her, a taped call to the Lebanon Communications Center shows.
As police arrived, they found Mr. Bornhoeft leaving the parking lot in his black Chevro let pickup truck. They confronted him. He got out of the truck and pointed a gun to his head, Chief Burns said.
Ten members of the Warren County Tactical Response Team arrived within an hour, leveling their rifles at Mr. Bornhoeft as two police negotiators attempted to talk him into putting his revolver down.
Standing about 10 yards from the window of the room where Mr. Johnson lay dead, Mr. Bornhoeft told the officers what he had done, Chief Burns said.
The chief said there was no
sign of a break-in at the apartment, which indicated Mr. Bornhoeft either entered through an unlocked door or had a key.
“I don't think there's any big question he is the shooter,” Chief Burns said.
Reached at her home in Spring City, Tenn., Mr. Bornhoeft's mother didn't know what to think.
She said Mrs. Johnson broke the news to her Friday afternoon in a phone call.
“I asked her why. She said because Jeffrey still loved her and didn't want to see her with somebody else,” Joy Bornhoeft said.
“Things had to have happened with her that set him off,” she said. “Something serious had to happen. It's not like him.”
Other residents in the four-unit building were not home at the time of the shooting. Mrs. Johnson's children, who are in the intermediate and elementary grades in the Lebanon district, had already boarded the school bus.
Neighbors in the normally quiet and immaculately kept complex said they didn't know much about the Johnsons, who had moved to Lebanon about a year ago from Lenoir City, Tenn.
Residents said they had not seen anything that would indicate trouble between the Johnsons and Mr. Bornhoeft. Lynn Clark, who lives upstairs from the Johnsons, said she last saw Mr. Bornhoeft when he picked up his two daughters and a son for visitation last weekend, and later dropped them off.
“It didn't seem like anything was going on,” Mrs. Clark said.
The couple, who were divorced in December 1999 after filing for dissolution a year earlier, had had problems before, according to court records in Loudon County, Tenn.
In February 1999, Mr. Bornhoeft was fined $10 and court costs and ordered to undergo counseling after being found guilty of misdemeanor assault for a November 1998 incident involving Mrs. Johnson. Lebanon police said he held his wife at gunpoint.
At the Four Seasons Apartment complex in Mason where he lived, maintenance worker Bill Carpenter said he routinely fixed items at Mr. Bornhoeft's apartment. “Whenever I would talk to him he always seemed like a nice guy,” said Mr. Carpenter. “He was kind of quiet and pretty much kept to himself.”
Janice Morse, Dan Horn and Kevin Aldridge contributed to this report.
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