Thursday, April 21, 2016
By Sarah Lehr
LIBERTY
One Liberty resident went to Denny’s Restaurant on Tuesday evening to enjoy a peaceful dinner with his children. The meal was interrupted, however, when the man ended up intervening during a fight that broke out in the restaurant’s parking lot.
During that melee, police say Josue Rodriguez, 39, of Struthers severely beat his wife and attempted to hit her and another man with his car.
Rodriguez was arraigned Wednesday in Girard Municipal Court on charges of felonious assault and domestic violence. He is in the Trumbull County Jail on a $250,000 bond and will appear in court next Wednesday for a preliminary hearing.
Police responded about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to the restaurant on Belmont Avenue. Rodriguez told officers he was driving past the restaurant and became enraged when he saw his wife and another man in the parking lot.
During the ensuing altercation, he accelerated toward them and crashed his car into his wife’s vehicle, causing extensive damage, a police report states.
Rodriguez then backed up and struck a pickup truck, forcing it into a block wall.
An employee of nearby Sam’s Pizza Shop reported seeing Rodriguez’s wife crawling out of one of the vehicles, at which time Rodriguez again slammed into her car with his car, “nearly crushing her,” the employee told police.
Rodriguez chased his wife and the employee through the pizza store and, after catching up to his wife in front of the pizzeria, hit her repeatedly in the head with the brick before the worker and several others came to her aid, the employee told authorities.
The woman was treated at St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital for possible fractures.
While investigating the multiple crashes, police recovered a broken concrete block with what appeared to be blood on it. The Ohio State Highway Patrol and the Girard Police Department also responded to the scene.
Matt Smith, a manager at Denny’s, said he’s seen fights break out at the restaurant before, but they were never so extreme.
“It was kind of unbelievable,” Smith said. “Things calmed down, but I could tell a lot of my employees were jittery and shaken up afterward.”
Witnesses said people poured out of Denny’s and other nearby businesses to find out what was going on. Some, like the Liberty resident who was eating with his family, tried to intervene.
“I wanted to be careful because I didn’t know if someone had a gun,” the customer said, adding he didn’t want to be identified. “But, mostly I wanted to get him off her. He was really whaling on her.”
The customer, who used to be a bouncer, said he tried to verbally de-escalate the situation before police arrived and handcuffed Rodriguez.
Despite the ruckus, the Liberty man said he would readily dine at the restaurant again.
“You take the good with the bad,” he said. “It’s always dinner and a show on Belmont Avenue.”
Contributor: Correspondent Sean Barron