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Family safe, stunned after SUV plows into home
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
Photo
Angel Johnson, left, and her husband, Christopher Reynolds stand in what is left of their living room at 1630 Deerfield Ave. SW, Warren, Wednesday morning. While they were away on Tuesday afternoon, a vehicle being driven by a Youngstown man who had just been shot in the chest drove through the front of the house and nearly out the back. The one-story house might be a total loss, but they can only imagine the tragedy that would have occurred if they and their two small children had been home. Behind them to the right is where the home office and computer desk was. To the left was the bathroom and hallway.
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The thought of how many of the four Reynolds family members might have been killed Tuesday afternoon if they had been home left Angel Johnson and Christopher Reynolds shaking their heads in disbelief Wednesday morning.
“I’m trying to figure out where the computer table is,” Reynolds said.
“We lost everything. My bathroom is gone. Thank God we weren’t home,” Johnson said.
The couple was packing up salvageable items and moving them to Johnson’s mother’s house Wednesday after a Youngstown man who had been shot in the torso while driving a car nearby crashed into their 1630 Deerfield Ave. SW house at 4:45 p.m.
The sport-utility vehicle passed all the way through the front of the house and was feet away from continuing out the back.
Destroyed were the living room and computer room in the front of the house and the bathroom and hallway in the back. The collision also pushed out walls in the kitchen and the back of the house.
Police say Edward J. Hines III, 22, of Fairgreen Avenue, Youngstown, was shot in the torso by someone in another vehicle at the intersection of Sixth Street and Colt Court Southwest.
He is in critical condition in a Cleveland hospital but is expected to survive.
A 23-year-old Fairgreen Avenue man who also was in Hines’ 2000 Nissan Xterra was not injured.
Police believe Hines drove the vehicle about a tenth of a mile west on Sixth Street after being shot but was incapacitated by the time he got to Deerfield Avenue and continued through the intersection and into the Reynolds home.
Johnson said she, her husband and children Israel, 5, and Egypt, 3, had gone to Youngstown that afternoon to look at another home and returned to Warren about 5:30 p.m.
The vehicle passed through the front door, taking out the wall that divided the living room and computer room, smashing the computer table and two computers, the couch and love seat and leaving a pile of rubble where the bathroom once was.
The computer desk is a favorite hangout for their son, Israel. Johnson said she and Reynolds regularly spend family time on the couches at that time of day.
Christopher, son of James Reynolds of the 1950s doo-wop group the Edsels (“Rama Lama Ding Dong”), is a performer with the current Edsels and The Reynolds Brothers.
“If my wife would have been laying on the couch, she could be twisted up like a pretzel,” Reynolds said.
Detective Wayne Mackey of the Warren Police Department said police don’t have suspects at this time in the shooting but are checking surveillance video at the nearby Shadi Food Market on Tod Avenue Southwest to see whether the conflict might have started there.
The shooting apparently took place in Warren Township, just south of Warren, though the Reynolds home, which they were renting, is in the Palmyra Heights neighborhood of Warren.
Warren and Warren Township officials were meeting Wednesday to determine which police department will take the lead in the case, Mackey said.
Hines and his passenger have felony convictions through Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. Hines was placed on three years’ probation in June on a drug-possession conviction.