Tag: Middletown

Justice in the Shadows: The Asiah Slone Murder and America’s Hidden Epidemic of Unsolved Crime


On a quiet street in Middletown, Ohio, a small house stands as a grim monument to the collapse of a once-thriving community. Behind that house, in a trash bin parked in an alley, police discovered the dismembered remains of Asiah Slone—a woman whose life ended violently in June 2024. Her murder was shocking not only for its brutality but for what it revealed about the social decay festering in America’s forgotten towns. Slone’s death was not an isolated tragedy; it was a symptom of a deeper disease—economic collapse, drug addiction, homelessness, and the erosion of moral and civic order.


The Slone case is a lens into the broader epidemic of violent crime in economically depleted communities.  Murders, like Slone’s, are usually prosecuted successfully, but many countless others remain unsolved, creating an illusion of justice—celebrating convictions in high-profile cases—masks a systemic failure to address the conditions that breed violence and what these failures mean for law enforcement, policy, and the future of American society.


Asiah Slone disappeared in late June 2024. For weeks, her absence drew little attention. In neighborhoods hollowed out by poverty and addiction, people vanish often—sometimes to rehab, sometimes to jail, sometimes to the grave. It wasn’t until July 1, when the stench of decomposition led authorities to a trash bin behind a house on Centennial Avenue, that the horror came to light. Inside were Slone’s remains, cut into pieces and stuffed into garbage bags.¹


Investigators quickly focused on Brandon Davis, a 46-year-old man with a long history of drug abuse and petty crime. Witness testimony and forensic evidence revealed that Davis shot Slone in the head while she slept, then ordered Perry Hart, who has an addiction, to finish the job in the basement. Hart complied, firing a second shot to ensure death. Together, they dismembered the body and disposed of it in the alley.²


The motive was depressingly banal: a dispute over stolen items and simmering resentment among a group of people living on society’s margins. Drugs were everywhere. Homelessness was common. Violence was inevitable.³


As grand jury foreman, I signed the indictment that set the case in motion. The prosecutors did their job well, securing a conviction in February 2025. Davis received life without parole for 45 years. Hart pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping. Justice, in the narrow sense, was served. But the deeper question remains: What does justice mean in a world where desperation breeds murder, and where countless similar crimes go undetected or unpunished?

Slone’s case was prosecuted because it was apparent. The evidence was overwhelming: a body in a dumpster, confessions, and DNA on the weapon. But what about the murders that leave no such trail? What about the victims whose bodies are never found, or whose killers are careful enough to erase their tracks?


The numbers are sobering. In 1964, the U.S. homicide clearance rate—the percentage of murders solved—was 83.7%. Today, it hovers around 50%.⁴ In 2022, the rate hit a historic low of 52.3%.⁵ Even with slight improvements in 2024, nearly half of all murders in America remain unsolved. In Ohio, the rate is about 64%, meaning one in three killings goes unpunished.⁶


Why? Several factors converge:
• Resource Constraints: Police departments are understaffed and underfunded.
• Community Distrust: Witnesses fear retaliation or don’t trust law enforcement.
• Complexity of Cases: Drug-related killings often involve transient populations and chaotic circumstances.
• Legal Barriers: Prosecutors need airtight evidence to avoid wrongful convictions.


The Slone case stands out because it was reckless. The killers left a body in a public alley. They talked. They confessed. Most killers are not so careless.  This case is emblematic of a much larger crisis. Across the United States, violent crime statistics reveal a staggering reality.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms that more than 250,000 homicides since 1980 remain unsolved. These numbers represent not just data points but shattered families and communities living under the shadow of fear.

Drug epidemics amplify this violence. The CDC reports that fentanyl-related overdose deaths reached 72,776 in 2023, accounting for 69% of all overdose fatalities. DEA intelligence shows cartels dominate fentanyl distribution, sourcing precursors from Chinese suppliers and flooding U.S. streets with synthetic opioids. These networks fuel turf wars, retaliatory killings, and systemic corruption, creating a perfect storm of addiction and violence.

Racial disparities compound the crisis: murders of Black victims are significantly less likely to be solved than those of White victims, according to a 2023 study by the Murder Accountability Project.  A lot of that reason is cultural, because of a lack of cooperation in black communities to provide testimony against crime.  Police departments face chronic staffing shortages, and under labor union guidelines, paint themselves in corners that don’t match public sentiment all too often, with the International Association of Chiefs of Police reporting a 14% vacancy rate nationwide. Forensic labs struggle with DNA backlogs exceeding 100,000 cases. Community distrust further hampers investigations, as witnesses fear retaliation or lack confidence in the justice system.  The overall story on the labor side of crime fighting is that too many employees in the industry are too lazy to do the job, causing serious capacity problems in doing the actual work.  So the industry sets the bar low, goes after all the most obvious cases, while many of the real crimes go unreported and unpunished. 

The opioid crisis intersects with violent crime in devastating ways. Cartels have diversified beyond narcotics into human trafficking, generating $236 billion annually through forced labor and sexual exploitation. Millions of women and children are entrapped in these networks, often under the same criminal syndicates orchestrating narcotics flows. This duality magnifies humanitarian crises, rendering cartels not merely criminal enterprises but systemic violators of fundamental rights.

Solutions require investment in technology, expansion of cold case units, and robust witness protection programs. Federal funding for violent crime investigations has stagnated, even as homicide rates rise. Legislative initiatives must prioritize improvement in the clearance rate as a metric of justice, not just crime reduction.  But the reality of the story is that we have a society that has stopped looking in trash cans. When they smell something bad, they don’t regulate crime in their own communities for fear of that crime coming in their direction.  Cops don’t work enough, and the unions frustrate full employee engagement.  There aren’t enough volunteer law enforcement efforts.  I can say that when I was on the grand jury, I was the top cop of my community for a month.  I didn’t get paid, but a minimal amount for the effort.  But it was one of the best jobs I ever did, and I was very proud to sign the indictment on Brandon Davis, the murderer of Asiah Slone.  I would do that every day for free.  So I don’t understand cops who have to go to Walgreens for a tampon run every time they have to work a few hours of overtime.  Getting shot at and living dangerously is part of the fun.  So I’m not sympathetic to complaining at all.  Because the criminals know that the cops really don’t care, that for most of them, it’s just a job.  And the courts are only prosecuting the most obvious cases, the easy ones.  And the Slone case was an easy one.  But one thing is sure in all this, it can’t continue at this rate.  Society has to reform at the level of the family, because none of this is working.

[1] FBI Uniform Crime Reports, Historical Clearance Data, 1964–2024.

[2] Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Trends in the United States, 2023.

[3] Murder Accountability Project, Clearance Rate Analysis, 2023.

[4] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Drug Overdose Mortality Data, 2023.

[5] U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Fentanyl Threat Assessment, 2024.

[6] International Association of Chiefs of Police, Workforce Crisis Report, 2024.

[7] National Institute of Justice, Forensic Backlog Study, 2023.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Kamala Harris and Her Communist Democrats: Trying to escape the burden of what has been

One of the important things that Kamala Harris says repeatably in her public appearances is “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”  It is her most consistent statement and is the essential political platform of “progressives.”  They want change from their present condition, into what “can be.”  Usually, that consists of bad decisions that they have made and allows them to erase the implications of failure and replace it with some form of comfortable group acceptance. What Kamala is talking about is the summary of the Karl Marx book, The Communist Manifesto and has been the mantra of those types of people for well over a century now. Yet, in the most successful country in the world, which has empowered the most people over the longest period, why would we want all this change? Because what she is saying is that she and her kind want to change from the best country to the worst. That is what Barack Obama’s Hope and Change always was essentially, the hope of the communists of the world that America would change its practices and become just as bad as everyone else. When you are a loser, as Kamala Harris clearly has been, and made terrible decisions in life that are embarrassing, of course you would not want to be burdened with that memory for the rest of your life. So, for Democrats, this idea of not being burdened by what has been, is a chance to reinvent themselves away from all their mistakes. And that is what we are up against with the global Marxists, which Kamala Harris is their clear representative. What she is talking about in her radical political platform is an appeal to the losers of the world to hit a great reset and tear away the standards of success, so that she can make way for that unburdened judgment of social norms, such as not having reckless sex, and aborting the child as a result so that they can be unburdened from their mistakes.  Or using drugs to become unburdened by the impact of reality. Or going on welfare to be unburdened by the pressure of a need to produce income to support your family. That is the world of Kamala Harris and her Democrats of Doom in America.

It was not always easy for people to admit that there was a communist party platform in America that was seeking to undo all our lives. We always thought that the threat of invasion would be as it was presented in movies about war, such as The Longest Day with John Wayne. Or Red Dawn. But I have warned for years that much of what the Democrat party does is communist. And there has never been such an overt communist running for office than Kamala Harris and her VP pick the China loving Tim Walz. And yes, he loves China and has quite a long history with the communist country. These are not our friendly neighbors. These are hostile insurgents seeking to undo the American way of life, which is to say, a successful life of liberty and happiness for which we are all entitled to pursue under the freedom of self-assertion. I can say that I have seen a lot of stuff. And recently as part of an experience on a grand jury, I can say that I have seen a grotesque underbelly of what is really going on in society, and I will have a lot to say about it. But my opinions do not come from a vacuum of experiencing the world from the safety of my own peer groups. I have always stepped out of that comfort zone looking for added information and I can say that I have seen the worst of what people can do.

Sadly, I have always loved Middletown, Ohio, where J.D. Vance is from. It is a shame what has happened to it. But it is what happens to cities that end up with leadership like what Kamala Harris proposes, where too much communism is brought in to manage what used to be a thriving community. In the case of Middletown, diversity was brought in where shared values were not normalized. And the well-paying jobs of their economy were shipped away through policy to the needs of globalism. And what’s left is an entire community that cannot go on vacation without the burdens of society wanting to accept people taking over your home. I can say that I have seen a multitude of examples in just Middletown of the worst that people can do to each other where social collapse has happened as a direct result of communist policy hidden behind the political party of Democrats. And there are homes where drug use is as common as eating cereal for breakfast. People come and go from these homes wondering aimlessly through life and they seek drugs to bury their pains of horrendous decisions made through life in great abundance. And the weight of their bad decisions, unpaid for, brings the world around them into a landscape of misery. That is precisely what Kamala Harris, who has been a drug user herself, means when she wants to be unburdened from the past to make way for what can be. Whenever a society is running from their past where they did not achieve success due to bad decisions, you end up with a result of failure compounded because behavior was never inspired to change for the better. They just ran from the results of their failure, which never fixes anything.

What Democrats leave in their wake is the kind of nightmares that you see in high crime areas, what Democrats have essentially done to California, and communities like Middletown, Ohio. The way people who seek to unburden themselves from the mistakes of the past live is incredibly detrimental and the world would be shocked if forced to look at it for too long. It is one thing to hear about sad things going on in the world, its quite another to see and hear the details of a criminal underbelly that is the net result of lives lived under the mantra that Kamala Harris is uttering for the entire country. To be unburdened by the past to make way for what can be. She is not talking about success, because America has been successful with the most opportunities for the most people that there are in the world. Rather, Democrats want people to fail in life, because their entire platform is to replace that failure with the stolen redistribution of value that they use the government to steal from good people, and to give to desperate people who have lived their lives in horrible ways. And they seek to spread their influence on every corner of the globe with communism, because through shared guilt and penalty, the burden of a life lived poorly can be shared, so that those most guilty don’t have to be crushed by the burden of bad decisions for the rest of their lives.  Kamala Harris and her communist Democrats want people to make mistakes because she is offering redemption from those errors which then gives centralized government more power. And a world of individuality is destroyed as a result, which is the change that communists want to evoke in the world, especially in America.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

J.D. Vance for Vice President: They tried to kill Trump, fight, fight, fight–what the hell does anybody expect–anything less?

Obviously, this isn’t from Joe, but one of his 25 year old interns at Chipotle’s

Personally, I think Senator Lang was too nice. After all, he is a nice guy. But he’s not immune to human emotions, for sure. For some context, there was quite a lot of controversy when Senator George Lang came to the Middletown High School, where J.D. Vance was making his first solo speech in his hometown once President Trump picked him for Vice President, and George spoke about civil war.  All the big media outlets picked it up and ran with it as if George said something wrong, indicating that if Trump and Vance were not elected this November, there would be a civil war in this country.  Immediately, as George is a political representative who endeavors to represent as many constituents in his district as possible, many people are just not up to current events and thought George had said too much in the heat of the moment.  They are more worried about picking their kids up from soccer practice than their country’s fate.  But when people think there is something wrong with me because I like George Lang so much as a personal friend, well, as I say to them, I know George.  I know what’s in his heart.  He is a good politician.  I don’t think he needed to send out an apology for what he said.  We aren’t living in that woke world anymore.  The communist left doesn’t get to regulate us like cattle through violations of our free speech, where we get in trouble for saying outlandish things while they do much, much worse and get away with it. That is part of why President Trump picked J.D. Vance as his vice president. He is a young man we have all come to know well, and we were proud of him for giving his speech in Middletown.  He’s a Butler County Republican, and our emotions are encouraged by his involvement in high office.  But George is right about the civil war.  People, now that they know what the game is, are not going to sit around being dictated to by a bunch of globalists who run our media and our elections and strive to manipulate every part of our lives. 

J.D. Vance alluded to what George was talking about in a special interview with Jesse Watters, where he stated that if that assassin’s bullet had struck Trump in Pennsylvania, it would have taken our country half a century to get over.  God stepped in, and Trump is OK, but the intent cannot be ignored.  The radical communist left is lucky that we are a nation of laws and that we have hope that Trump can fix everything without violence and bloodshed.  But as I have been saying for years now, take that hope away, as the communist left has been trying to do, and bad things are going to happen.  The intentions of Democrats in political America, if that hope in Trump is removed, then we will end up with a much worse situation than anything that happened on January 6th.  Trying to shame people into some controlled speech that favors the position of domestic enemies in America is water well under the bridge.  George Lang had a right to be passionate when he spoke to the crowd to warm them up for J.D. Vance.  And he didn’t need to apologize for anything.  If anything, he was probably too accomidating. The panic from the left on comments like that is the realization that they don’t have control over the mass population the way they fantasize they do.  And if Senator Lang is talking about civil war, then what are people not so well connected thinking?  That scares them and, why they tried to make a big deal out of what George said.  I’ve known George for a few decades now, and I would call him a very good friend, along with his family.  And I know most of the people in the audience that were behind J.D. Vance that day.  I know what they are thinking, too.  And I’ll just say it: Americans expect personal freedom that a globalist insurrection has violated, and there is a thin line between outright violence and properly held elections.  People are hoping to resolve the issue through elections and without violence.  But if the elections don’t work, then it won’t be a favorable outcome for the radical, communist left who work on behalf of international globalism.  And shaming people into correct speech won’t make the sentiment go away.  Communists worldwide should be very happy that Trump is ahead in the polls and that he picked a nice young man to be his vice president, who is very level-headed and intellectual.  Most people have difficulty containing their emotions and are preparing their minds for war.  Trust me…………….

I remember when I was first talked into supporting J.D. Vance in the backyard of another friend, the very wonderful Nancy Nix.  She had been telling me about this great young kid who wrote the Hillbilly Elegy and that he was running for senate.  I wasn’t keen on him then, but she insisted I give him a chance and meet him at an event she was hosting.  So I did, and J.D. Vance impressed me as the future of the MAGA movement.  He has been a great senator, and I have met him many times since then.  And all this was talk we had in that same backyard with the same people as we were working on getting Bernie Moreno elected into the other senate seat, fresh off everyone coming back from the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin where J.D. Vance had just been named as Trump’s VP.  I told hundreds of people over the past several days that I don’t see the situation as desperate.  But everyone comes to me and asks what I think about a potential civil war, a war between the assumption of personal freedom in America as opposed to the financial monsters of international globalism.  And I say the best way to fight that battle is to put Trump in office and set up the future with someone like J.D. Vance.  When we say fight, fight, fight, we have a right because we’re not going to sit around and take the crap we have been taking from the communist left.   And it was only a week ago that radicals, from what the evidence indicates from within our own government, tried to kill President Trump.  The assassin wasn’t just some transgender kid who decided to shoot the president one day.  He missed, so let’s return to picking our kids up from soccer practice and forget about it.  No, we almost had our hopes for a peaceful resolution to this mess removed from us, and I don’t think the communist media understands that there is no negotiation on the personal freedom front.  Shaming people with January 6th, or something that Senator Lang had said, is a tactic that created this mess, and people have regrets about being too nice to our domestic enemies.  But the communist left is our enemy, and we are transparent about that now.  We are not all in this together.  We are going to Make America Great Again, and we are going to defeat globalism now that we have seen the game plan displayed to us over the last four or five years.  Surrendering our country so that we can have peace with our attackers is not on the menu.  And it’s not just George Lang feeling it.  It’s everyone.  Much, much more than anyone in the media wants to admit. 

I don’t want to get too in the weeds, but this past week, I was at court when the John Carter sentencing was happening.  I had a break from my work there and went across the street from the Hamilton courthouse to grab a Big Mac from McDonald’s.  But in so doing, I had to go through the media that was set up outside to report on the fate of the murderer who killed Katelyn Markham.  I saw many media people I have known over the years, so I know the type of people who tried to make a big deal out of George’s comments.  They are friendly people, but they are clueless about what’s going on in people’s minds.  That Carter case is old, and yet they were stuck on it as if people out there were still clinging to a sense of justice that allowed a young person like Katelyn to be murdered, then expending a decade to see that murderer get three additional years in prison on a plea deal.  Many media personalities outside the courthouse, as I was eating my Big Mac and talking to them about the case, have no idea what’s happening in the world.  The old rules of name-shaming high school politics of international communism are criteria that America is abandoning.  And everyone should be very grateful that a local guy in J.D. Vance is headed to the White House to bring a peaceful transition of power and sanity to our system of government because polite society has had enough of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Klaus Schwab to last a lifetime.  And if votes don’t work, then fighting it is.

They have to prove they can do the job. If they can’t, they have to explain, why.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Bernie Moreno and J.D. Vance in West Chester, Ohio: Making Hard Work Great Again

I always enjoy the optimism of an early campaign effort, and Bernie Moreno’s is undoubtedly one of those good ones, early on. He’s running for the Ohio Senate seat against Sharrod Brown, but first, he has to win a primary, so he and J.D. Vance were at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio to make a pitch, and it was full of optimism and an approach to politics that is full of more than empty promises. I like seeing people like Bernie getting into politics, people who have been personally successful and know what it looks like, and who want to do good things for all the right reasons. So, I was enthusiastic about seeing the two of them together, a current senator, and the one who would be his partner representing Ohio in the Swamp we want to drain. We are looking for MAGA Republicans who can work with a Trump administration, unlike the last time. If there has been anything good about losing Trump to exile for a while, it has been that it gave us a chance to knock out the firewall that the Congress and Senate had in preserving the Swamp. If you want to drain it, there must be cooperation from the other branches of government. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. And things are shaping up in a very positive way. I am pretty excited about the future, for a lot of reasons, and one of them was a book I had been reading that very day when I was going to see J.D. Vance again. It was Johan Norberg’s Capitalist Manifesto and it was strange to read a quote in it about J.D. Vance, from a Swedish perspective. Norberg’s book is not an American outlook on capitalism. Instead, it’s a European globalist view and a fascinating process to watch. But he was using J.D. Vance and an example about Middletown, Ohio to make a point that I thought was well made. So, it was weird to have all those elements come together in one Friday morning spectacle.

The point made was haunting me a bit because I am a bit older than J.D. Vance, and I watched Middletown, Ohio, go through its transition from a wonderful blue-collar town that ran off of an Armco economy, a steel mill that told a similar story to those in Pittsburg up the road.  They were the centerpieces of the town, and it’s where everyone worked.  But through lots of influences, particularly communist globalism, the steel mill lost its power, and the economy of Middletown tanked, and never recovered.  It went from a thriving town to something that looked like a third-world hell hole within a few decades.  By the time J.D. Vance came along and was a young person, his experience was captured nicely in the book The Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same name by Ron Howard.  That popularity and the association that J.D. Vance now has in the Trump MAGA movement, which Bernie Moreno was now a part of, got Johan’s attention to make a point about globalism in general.  J.D. Vance had said, which Norberg quoted, that neither he nor his friends wanted to have a blue-collar job.  They were all told to grow up and move away to some white-collar job, and that America was going to move to a kind of service-oriented economy.  I remember hearing my dad’s speech, “Do you want to grow up and dig ditches?”  Blue-collar work was frowned upon, even discouraged.  So, no wonder so many of those good jobs picked up and moved to places like China.  It wasn’t so much bad policy that moved them, but the education system, the entertainment culture, and political priorities that had it all wrong, or right if you consider that they were all in on a scheme to destroy America, that caused so many young people to grow up and not want to work.

If you want to destroy America, convince their young people to grow up and be lazy.  This wasn’t the point of Johan Norberg, and indeed not where J.D. Vance was politically.  But it was the underlying reason all the steel mills picked up and moved to other places through globalism.  It was getting harder and harder to find good employees to do these jobs; the labor unions certainly didn’t make it any easier, so those corporations moved to places with better workers and more of them.  And the natural poison pill to cultures like Middletown, Ohio, was that nobody wanted to grow up and work as hard as they had to watch their parents’ work.  Those kinds of blue-collar jobs were looked down upon as if they were part of a lower class.  It wasn’t enough to own a home, a few cars, and a bass boat.  Kids watched their parents be put down by culture in general for working in a steel mill, so they grew up wanting nothing to do with any of it.  And now that America doesn’t make much anymore, people are seeing firsthand how valuable manufacturing is to a culture and rethinking how they value those jobs.  That is the primary driver of the MAGA political movement.  People were told many things over the years; now that they see where it has all been going, they don’t like it.  And they want to improve the situation dramatically. 

I would offer that for those who profess that they want to make America Great Again, the best place to start would be to make Hard Work a Priority Again.  It is not so much a throwback to how things used to be, but to look at the grandparents and their parents who made up towns like Middletown, Ohio, promising to begin with and value what they did and to emulate that hard work in the future.  Americans were suckered by globalism into being lazy; they were told that they could grow up and make lots of money in a useless white-collar job where they ordered pizza at 9 am for lunch three hours later, doing very little in between.  And that everything would be great.  And it hasn’t been.  Americans need to get back to working hard and working often.  We need to stop listening to the rest of the world that wants more socialism, which consists of more breaks, more government handouts, and much less freedom.  The globalism we have experienced was a disaster and has been terrible for places like Middletown, Ohio.  Not because globalism was evil in itself, where capitalism would have an opportunity to lift everyone to a higher living level.  However, what globalism turned out to be was an attack on the American way of life toward conversion to global communism; that attack came in the form of convincing an entire nation that hard work was beneath them and that whole generations would grow up to be lazy, entitled, and dependent on globalism for their necessities.  The kind of MAGA movement politics that J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno were pitching and the type of globalism Johan Norberg was trying to sell to the world involved an appreciation for hard work at its core.  Something that would undoubtedly make Middletown, Ohio, Great Again.  We want the future J.D. Vance kids and their friends not to grow up and sleep on the couch but to go to work and do great things with a lot of ambition through their actions.  And through that embrace of values, America and the world can be great again because it all starts with hard work and people willing to do it for the betterment of humanity.

Rich Hoffman