Washington County Year in Review: A year of tragedy and turmoil
A heroin epidemic that made national news, two devastating fires and four homicide cases dominated the list of newsworthy events in Washington County in 2015, according to a poll of the Observer-Reporter editorial staff.
The heroin horror was the runaway winner among the voters, followed by blazes at the landmark Century Inn and the Washington City Mission, which are being rebuilt. Here are capsules of the top 10 news events:
1. There were 57 fatal drug overdoses in Washington County through Nov. 13. Since 2010, there have been more deaths from overdoses than from car accidents, homicides or suicides. The county has had 490 drug-related deaths since 1992, according to the most recent data from the coroner’s office.
Washington County attracted the attention of national news outlets over the summer when a spate of overdoses, some fatal, happened in two consecutive weeks – three one week, five the next-as several batches of heroin were found laced with the powerful synthetic opioid Fentanyl.
Several local police departments have joined state police in training to use and keep Narcan “pens,” a fast-acting nasal spray antidote, in their vehicles. But reportage over the past year has revealed that simply reviving addicts in the hope they seek treatment hasn’t been enough.
The Communities Moving Forward Coalition, led by Canonsburg Mayor Dave Rhome and members of the Washington County Drug and Alcohol Commission, has piloted novel ways to address addiction that include bringing addicts into churches to tell stories of their struggles and recoveries. Others have talked about answering their own wakeup calls.
2. A fast-moving fire swept through Century Inn on Aug. 17, heavily damaging the historic stone tavern along Route 40 in Scenery Hill.
People from across the country who had patronized the business for any number of celebrations expressed sadness over the fire, which also destroyed valuable art and antiques collections. No one was injured in a fire that was traced to an electrical malfunction in a first-floor utility room.
Owner Megin Harrington has pledged to rebuild the mansion at 2175 Route 40, parts of which date to 1788 in what was one of the oldest taverns in continuous operation along the National Road.
The tavern hosted Gen. Marquis de LaFayette for breakfast in 1825 and Andrew Jackson dined there in 1829, before he became president, according to a 1955 report in the Washington Reporter.
3. Residents of Washington and surrounding communities were lauded for their unwavering generosity following a devastating kitchen fire at the City Mission, 84 W. Wheeling St., in the early hours of June 9.
Donations poured in after the disaster, which displaced more than 60 men and destroyed the kitchen and dining room. Three men’s dormitories, the medical clinic and attic also sustained major fire, smoke and water damage.
Businesses and individuals donated money, food, supplies and space to help the faith-based organization continue services, including distribution of 300 meals a day.
“It’s absolutely amazing what an outpouring of compassion and care we have experienced here,” President and Chief Executive Officer Dean Gartland told the Observer-Reporter in June.
The men were housed in various locations before being moved to mobile housing units at Washington and West Beau streets – a temporary solution until renovation of the West Wheeling building is complete.
Work on the $3.4 million project started Oct. 1, with all work expected to be completed by March 2018.
4. When it comes to local falls from grace, the story of former judge Paul Pozonsky would rank on just about anyone’s top 10 list. He is the only Washington County jurist who has a black-robed portrait hanging in the courthouse and a mug shot snapped of him clad in the orange togs of the county jail inmate.
District Attorney Gene Vittone became suspicious of Pozonsky, who, in an unusual series of procedures, ordered that cocaine evidence seized in drug arrests be brought to his chambers for pretrial hearings. Pozonsky later issued an order that the drug evidence be destroyed. Some was retrieved, and tests were conducted at the state police crime laboratory. The drugs had been replaced with other substances, including baking soda, or they weighed less than had been originally recorded.
Pozonsky, 60, whose 30-year judicial history included a stint as the magistrate in McDonald, retired abruptly from the court under a cloud in 2012. He was charged criminally by the state police organized crime task force in 2014, and eventually entered a guilty plea to misdemeanor charges of theft, obstruction of justice and misapplying entrusted government property for stealing cocaine evidence while he served as a Washington County judge.
“He knew he had a problem,” said Senior Judge Daniel L. Howsare of Bedford County at Pozonsky’s sentencing. “He knew counseling was available, but instead he decided to use evidence to satisfy his drug use. That’s difficult to overlook.”
In June, Pozonsky reported to the jail, where he was granted work-release status until his parole 30 days later.
5. A state police tactical unit in Avella ended an eight-hour standoff with a murder suspect by entering the victim’s house, where the suspect was hiding Oct. 14, only to find him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The body of Dennis James Kern, 61, was found in a bedroom at about 5 p.m. in his estranged wife’s house at 34 Browntown Road. That was one day after he shot and killed her while she sat in a car that had been rammed from behind along a rural road in Jefferson Township. Carolin M. Kern, 68, was fatally shot in her chest at a time when she was divorcing Kern in Washington County Court.
State police treated the case as murder-suicide. Investigators immediately suspected Dennis Kern to be a suspect in his wife’s slaying because of their rocky relationship.
Kern was to have turned his weapons over the county sheriff’s office under the terms of a protection-from-abuse order Carolin Kern obtained after he threatened to kill her in May. The weapons, however, had remained in his custody.
6. (tie) The murder of 10-year-old Ta’Niyah Thomas shocked the community in April 2014, and almost as startling was the decision of four co-defendants to forgo a trial and plead guilty to various charges in connection with her death.
Serving prison sentences at the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill are Anthian Goehring, 29, and Malik Thomas, 22, a distant relative of the deceased child. Douglas Cochran Jr., 19, and Richard White, 19, are serving their sentences at Pine Grove, Indiana County. All of the men are from Washington.
Eighty donations on Giveforward.com raised $6,000 to help with the funeral expenses for the child, who was described on the fundraising website as “our fallen angel.”
Police determined robbery was the motive behind the shooting, and they alleged that Goehring and Cochran kicked in the main door of the apartment building, approached the second-floor apartment and fired multiple shots through the door. Ta’Niyah apparently heard the gunfire and was running from her bedroom to her mother when she was hit by two bullets. The fourth-grade honor student at Washington Park Elementary School, who also was a cheerleader, was pronounced dead a short time later at Washington Hospital of a gunshot wound to the head.
Her mother, Shantye R. Brown, 35, had been charged in 2011 with intent to deliver drugs. In June, she pleaded guilty before Judge John DiSalle, who admitted her to the Intermediate Punishment program for three years, including three months in jail and 12 months of electronic home monitoring.
6. (tie) Marius TreVaughn Chatman was shot nine times execution-style at a Washington playground in the early hours of March 4. Police went door to door in the 7th Ward and scoured phone records from the 24-year-old city man’s last calls in the hours before his death. No suspect has ever been identified.
Authorities also haven’t been able to pin down leads in the slaying of Matthew Eric McGlone, 21, five months before Chatman was killed. McGlone was shot behind a city bar in the 1100 block of Jefferson Avenue. He and Chatman knew one another, police said, but weren’t enemies.
And family of Vincent Kelley, 46, have been frustrated with a lack of answers since he was shot and killed in June 2013 while trying to stop a robber fleeing the Citizens Bank inside Giant Eagle in South Strabane Township. That thief has never been identified.
But despite having little evidence in the cases, detectives said the investigations remain priorities and they are still asking the public for information.
8. For the first time this decade, a Washington County jury imposed a death penalty. Jordan Clemons, a football star in high school and reform school, was convicted in the Jan. 11, 2012, murder of his ex-girlfriend, Karissa Kunco, 21, of Baldwin. Her throat had been slit and her body had been dumped in Mt. Pleasant Township.
It took more than three years to bring the case to trial, but jurors took into account Clemons’ past felonies, a protection-from-abuse order Kunco had obtained from Allegheny County Court and his history of drug and alcohol abuse.
Judge Gary Gilman denied post-sentence motions, clearing the way for Clemons’ automatic appeal to state Supreme Court. The state Department of Corrections lists him as an inmate at the State Correctional Institution at Greene County.
9. In the Washington County commissioners’ race in November, Republican Mike McCormick ended election night with an unofficial 67-vote victory. But with more than 800 absentee ballots to be counted, McCormick’s slender lead against incumbent Democrat Harlan Shober was not a sure thing.
Two weeks later, after the elections office counted those votes plus some provisional ballots, Shober eked out a 35-vote victory in a race in which 42,000 cast ballots.
The outcome, according to local pundits, “flipped” this way: Most of the absentee ballots were cast before McCormick began a barrage of negative mailings, sent under the imprimatur of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, against Shober.
Shober, and other county officials, will take the oath of office Jan. 4. It will be Shober’s second four-year term as commissioner.
10. The troubled football team at California University of Pennsylvania was viewed on campus as having been entitled, overfunded and privileged, according to an independent review of the program that followed the arrests of six players in an off-campus assault.
Others at Cal U. reported that the program’s practice of recruiting Division II players with “serious criminal backgrounds” needed to end, according to the report issued Jan. 31 by The Compliance Group, which was hired to conduct the independent review of the program at a cost of $60,000.
The October 2014 arrests of the players brought the number of Cal U. football teammates with scrapes with the law to 43 over two years. The majority of those players were cited for being at a disorderly house party, marijuana possession, public drunkenness, underage drinking or criminal mischief.
The review also indicated former Cal U. President Angelo Armenti Jr. had “controlled the operations of the athletic program, especially football.” During his leadership, which began in 1992, a third of all sports scholarships went to football players, with costs reaching a total of $863,164 in the 2010-11 academic term, the highest amount cited in the study.
Overall, 24 news events garnered staff votes. Two shared 11th place in this survey: the accelerating decline of coal in this region, and the effects of the state budget impasse on counties and nonprofit agencies.They were immediately followed by the Peters Township teachers’ strike; a probe into cancer-causing contaminants in the Tri-County Joint Municipal Authority water supply serving SCI-Fayette; and the Donora-Webster Bridge implosion.