Police: Suspect in 4 Ohio Deaths Killed, 3 Officers Hurt

COLUMBUS, Ohio-- A man killed in a shootout Saturday in central Ohio that left four people wounded, including three police officers, may be a suspect in the slayings of four people whose bodies were found about 90 miles away at a house along a rural highway, authorities said.

Police in Columbus were responding to two calls about shots fired into homes when an officer spotted and pursued a vehicle matching a description given by the callers, Sgt. Rich Weiner said.

The driver crashed the pickup truck in a residential area, fired at the officer and ran off, evading authorities for more than 10 minutes before a shootout erupted at about 11 a.m. (1800 GMT), Weiner said.

Twenty-seven-year-old Randle Lee Roberts II was killed in the shootout, police said.
Officers learned after the shootout that Roberts might be a suspect in the quadruple slayings near West Union, a village in southern Ohio.

Sheriff Kim Rogers told The Columbus Dispatch that a young girl alerted a neighbor that she had found four of her relatives before the shootout. She didn't know they were dead, but she knew something was wrong. Adams County authorities, who discovered the four were dead, alerted officers in central Ohio because the suspect had a wife who lived in Columbus, Rogers said.

The sheriff's office has not publicly identified the four people found dead or say when or how they died.

One of the injured officers had left the hospital by afternoon, and another was expected to be released by Saturday night. The third remained hospitalized in stable condition with a serious but not life-threatening injury, Weiner said. Another man who was shot also was hospitalized, and police were trying to figure out whether he knew the dead suspect, was involved or was caught in the crossfire.