Just shy of midnight on Feb. 21, Ravenna police received a call reporting a suspicious person outside the Sherwin Williams store on West Main Street.
A deputy in the Portage County Sheriff’s Office was indicted on two counts of rape by a Cuyahoga County grand jury for an incident that took place Oct. 19 in Lyndhurst.
Police in Lyndhurst are investigating an unnamed Portage County sheriff’s deputy in relation to an alleged sexual assault reported on Oct. 19 at a time when the deputy was off duty.
The Portage County Sheriff’s Office made good on a pledge to adopt body cams this summer, purchasing over 150 body and dashboard cameras with plans to deploy them in January.
County Commissioners last week earmarked $500,000 in American Rescue Plan funds for equipment and renovations to the Portage County Sheriff’s Office dispatch center.
The dispatch center at the Portage County Sheriff’s Office could double in size, expanding from four to eight consoles, under an $800,000 plan the office proposed during the Sept. 1 county commission meeting.
A Randolph man was arrested after shooting someone on Fairground Road and leading multiple law enforcement agencies on a manhunt through his forested and booby trapped property, the Portage County Sheriff’s Office said.
Portage County commissioners last week approved a $411,886 contract to purchase 124 body cams and 30 in-car camera systems for the sheriff’s office.
After Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski took office in 2021, his chief deputy assured Portage County commissioners that getting body cameras was a priority. Over a year later, Zuchowski has not adopted the technology, even as much smaller police departments in the county outfit their officers with cameras and county commissioners say they would provide the necessary funding.
At 9:32 a.m. on May 14, a Garrettsville police officer and a Portage County sheriff’s deputy responded to a 911 call about an armed woman trying to break into her neighbor’s house in Windham Township.
The following calls were transcribed by AI and edited by Portager staff. You can listen to recordings of the first call here and the second here.
Before she was killed, Cora Baughman entered her neighbor’s garage with a gun and demanded to speak with him, the neighbor told dispatchers in two calls to 911 on Saturday morning.