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City police probe weekend shootings, robberies
YOUNGSTOWN
Police are investigating two shootings and two separate robberies that took place in various parts of the city on the last day of the hot weekend.
A 20-year-old West Side man told police he was driving in the area of Portland and Mahoning avenues just before 8 p.m. Sunday when he noticed two men standing on the porch of an abandoned house.
As he drove past the house, the man heard several gunshots.
The man, after hearing the gunshots, drove home and called police. Officers found one bullet hole in the rear gate of the man’s pickup truck.
A 21-year-old Ridge Avenue man told police he was at a home in the 1000 block of Belmont early Sunday when he got into a fight with his 23-year-old brother. The man said his brother choked him and swung at him, then pulled out a gun.
The man told police he tried to walked away and made it outside the home when he heard a gunshot near his ear. He said his brother fired a total of three shots at him. The victim was not hit by the gunfire, but did leave the residence and called police.
Police are looking for a man believed to have beaten a 54-year-old South Side woman with the butt of a gun then ran off with her purse.
The woman told police she was sitting in her car outside her East Auburndale Avenue home about 9 a.m. Sunday when a man walked up to her window, pulled out a gun and demanded her money. She told the man she did not have any money, and he began to beat her in the face with the gun.
The woman told police the man grabbed her purse after beating her and ran to a blue Chevrolet Lumina with temporary tags that was sitting in the South Side street near her driveway. The victim put her car in reverse and rammed the car the man was driving, then followed his car until she lost sight of the vehicle.
The victim refused medical attention, but police did note that the woman’s face was swollen and puffy.
Police are also looking for a man they say who routinely steals from the Family Dollar store on Gypsy Lane and Sunday punched a female clerk in the face as he was trying to leave the store with stolen merchandise.
Employees told police the man came into the store just before 8 p.m., took a trash bag from behind the counter and began filling the bag with undergarments, slippers, shorts and summer shirts.
A 29-year-old female employee attempted to stop the man and he punched her in the face then threatened to “shoot you next time” before running out of the store.
A man who witnessed the incident chased the thief down and tackled him not far from the building, but was unable to hold the man.
The witness, however, did recover the trash bag filled with stolen merchandise valued at $190.