Officers arrived at Pleasant and Fairview avenues shortly after 1 p.m. Saturday and found Harvey suffering from gunshot wounds. He was transported to the hospital and later died.
Harvey was shot while in a car, and then a shot was fired into the building at 2501 Pleasant, according to police. Edward Buschard was in the building, but was not injured by the bullet, according to the report.
Information about the city’s first apparent homicide of 2019 was released Monday morning, nearly two days after the daytime shooting in a busy residential neighborhood. On Sunday, police released no information despite multiple calls by Journal-News reporters.
According to scanner traffic on Saturday afternoon, police were told to look for a black BMW with four men inside in connection with the shooting.
A Volkswagen car, riddled with bullet holes, was parked on Fairview, which was roped off as a crime scene for hours. Eight frantic 911 calls were placed Saturday afternoon from people who saw or heard gunshots ring out.
“We need an ambulance right now, somebody got killed …my dude’s bleeding out,” a male caller told the Butler County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher. “We was at the barber shop, a car pulled up and shot the whole car up.”
The male caller said his friend had been shot in the head. He could not identify the car or suspects when the dispatcher asked “Who shot your friend?”
A female caller said people were running into the barber shop and out from the pawn shop after the shooting. She described seeing five people.
“There’s definitely guns in people’s hands,” the caller said. “Everybody is out in the street.”
A man told dispatchers, “Just passed a drive-by shooting going on … I kept going because I didn’t want get shot.”
The caller said it looked like the suspects were shooting out of a sunroof.
As of Sunday evening, Frank Downie, the founder and chairman of PROTOCOL which is the Lindenwald Community Council, still had not heard anything official about the shooting from Hamilton police or any other city officials.
“No one from the city reached out to us,” Downie said. “It’s a horrible thing that happened. No one wants to see that happen close to home. We’re not thrilled that’s happened here.”
Downie said getting information about the shooting from police “could had dispelled a lot of rumors on social media.”
He said PROTOCOL (People Reaching Out To Others Celebrating Our Lindenwald) has been working with city officials to slowly rebuild the business area on (U.S.) 127 (Pleasant Avenue).
“This is not the type of publicity you want when you’re trying to attract new businesses,” he said.
Two neighbors who live near the shooting occurred near Pleasant and Fairview avenue both said they heard multiple shots outside their homes. Kandy Hutchins said the rapid gunfire, six to seven shots, woke her from a nap on her living room couch and riled up her dogs. She told the Journal-News that she went to her front door window and grabbed her phone to call 911. Her Pleasant Avenue home overlooks the area where the shooting occurred.
Hutchins said she saw two men in hooded sweatshirts get out of a black sedan and each of the men went on both sides of the silver Volkswagen and picked up things off the street.
“It appeared that they were picking up the shell casings,” she said. “Things were happening so quick that I didn’t think to get a license plate number.”
She said she’s lived in the neighborhood for nearly a decade and in her current residence for the past several years.
“It freaked me out,” she said. “I was all jacked up yesterday. I’ve never seen anything like that before. This is a pretty quiet neighborhood.”
A few doors down on Fairview Avenue, Sandy Miller said she also heard a a rapid fire of shots, maybe five or six.
Miller said she’s lived in the neighborhood for 60 years. She also said she could not recall a shooting incident in the neighborhood.
“It’s always been a good neighborhood,” Miller said. “People will say ‘hi’ or wave and say ‘hello’ to each other but mind their own business and do their own thing.”
The case is being investigated as a homicide. Anyone with information is asked to call the department’s Investigations Section at 513-868-5811, extension 2002.
