Timothy Thomas' fatal confrontation with police April 7 started because an officer just happened to have checked his criminal record earlier that day.

        Mr. Thomas, 19, was wanted on 14 misdemeanor charges, most of them traffic offenses.

Thomas

        Officer David Damico knew that — he'd run “Timmy,” whom he recognized from working in Evanston, through the police computer system that afternoon after seeing officers arrest someone at Mr. Thomas' Woodburn Avenue building.

        Officer Damico thought it might have been Mr. Thomas, so he checked. It wasn't.

        But 10 hours later, the information on the open warrants prompted a chase that ended with Mr. Thomas being fatally shot in an Over-the-Rhine alley after he allegedly fled from police. He was not armed.

        Testimony in Officer Stephen Roach's trial has painted a clearer picture of Mr. Thomas' last minutes.

        He was in Over-the-Rhine early that day visiting his girlfriend, the mother of his son, Tywon, then three months old. He walked along the 1300 block of Vine Street near the Warehouse bar, nodded at Officer Robert Jones III who stood outside, and kept walking.

        Officer Jones, who is black, noticed him because he thought it was odd for a black person to be wearing a NASCAR-type jacket.

        Then Mr. Thomas made eye contact with the other officer working at the bar, Officer Damico, apparently recognized him and bolted. He sprinted away in his Nikes, and officers followed.

        After making a loop back to Vine Street along 12th, Jackson and 13th streets, Mr. Thomas jumped a chain-link fence into a parking lot. There, a little after 2 a.m., he encountered an Over-the-Rhine couple exercising their 100-pound Doberman pinscher.

        The dog owner, Niki Chang, noticed Mr. Thomas was sort of skipping, struggling to keep his red sweatpants pulled up as he ran. She didn't take much note of him, saying not much surprises her after living in Over-the-Rhine for years.

        “There's no rules for what goes on down there,” said her fiance, Gary Smith.

        They saw Mr. Thomas go over another fence and into a darker alley.

        Officer Roach ran into the dark alley, too, from the other end. Of the 46 bullets he carried with him, he fired one. Mr. Thomas fell forward onto the ground.

        At the Hamilton County morgue, Mr. Thomas was autopsy No. 194 for the year. He was 6-feet-2 and weighed 216 pounds. He'd smoked some pot recently, but was healthy except for the bullet hole in his upper left chest.

        His wrists, forearms and hands had fresh scratches, probably from the wire top of the fences he climbed while he was trying to escape arrest.

        The 9mm bullet from Officer Roach's gun went through Mr. Thomas' left lung first, then his aorta. It came out the middle of his back. Because the aorta is the body's largest blood supplier, severing it causes death quickly, said Dr. Robert Pfalzgraf, who performed the autopsy.

Fatal shot not likely accidental
Testimony today
       

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