Shootings, stabbing mar new year in Ohio

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

The new year arrived violently in some parts of Ohio, with a woman stabbed to death in Toledo, men shot to death in Cleveland, Dayton and Lorain and three people shot and wounded in Columbus on Tuesday.

The fatal shooting of a man on Cleveland’s east side just before 3 a.m. came as the city recorded a two-year spike in homicides last year and in 2011.

A second northeast Ohio shooting death occurred about an hour later after someone apparently opened fire at a crowded gas station in Lorain.

WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported that four people were struck in the Lorain shooting. Cuyahoga County Coroner spokesman Powell Caesar said one of them, a 33-year-old man, was pronounced dead after being taken to a Cleveland hospital.

In Dayton, police were investigating the death of a man found shot in a home, with his friends telling WHIO-TV in Dayton that he had been seen celebrating New Year’s as late as 2 a.m.

Columbus police were investigating two separate shootings early Tuesday in the city that wounded three, while Toledo police were investigating the death of a 23-year-old woman stabbed in the neck during a large fight at a bar shortly before 2 a.m.