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Police: Video Shows Suspect, Muzzle Flashes During East Wheeling Shooting

Video surveillance from a New Year’s Eve shooting in East Wheeling allegedly shows muzzle flashes coming from Jerome Saunders near the spot where investigators later found 14 spent shell casings.

That evidence and more led to Saunders’ arrest on three felony charges last month, regarding the Dec. 31 shooting in Lane E near 15th Street that left one man wounded, according to a criminal complaint written by Detective Rob Safreed of the Wheeling Police Department.

Saunders, 29, of 743 Market St. in Wheeling, was arrested Feb. 28 in Martins Ferry as part of a joint effort between the Martins Ferry Police Department and the U.S. Marshals Mountain State Fugitive Task Force.

He was charged with two counts of wanton endangerment and one count of malicious wounding related to the shooting that wounded Garrick Dalton of Wheeling Island, the complaint states.

This week, Saunders waived his preliminary hearing before Ohio County Magistrate Harry Radcliffe, and on Tuesday Saunders’ case was bound over to Ohio County Circuit Court.

Detective Rob Safreed of the Wheeling Police Department said he found 14 spent shell casings in the same spot where, in surveillance video from the nearby American Legion Post No. 89, Saunders is seen facing Dalton’s vehicle and firing, according to a criminal complaint.

Safreed states he believes it was Saunders who shot six bullets through Dalton’s vehicle door, wounding him by “bullet fragments or debris from a bullet that traveled through his car door.”

Saunders’ former parole officer confirmed that it is Saunders in the video that Safreed says shows him “walk west on the sidewalk, make a turn so that he was facing … Dalton’s vehicle,” followed by muzzle flashes, the complaint states.

“There were six bullet holes in the side of (Dalton’s) vehicle, and I collected a bullet fragment from inside the vehicle,” Safreed states in his complaint.

Lane E is within a half-block of the American Legion No. 89 at 1419 Jacob St., a private club. Wheeling City Council is considering whether to declare that club as a public nuisance, after City Manager Robert Herron and police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger recommended they do so.

Herron and Schwertfeger made that recommendation after studying recent nearby crimes, including the Dec. 31 shooting — crime trends and disturbances that they believe are connected, or could be connected, to the club.

Saunders is in West Virginia Northern Regional Jail on $500,000, cash-only bond.

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