Oh, da-Nile ain’t just a river in Egypt, honey

Stabbing victim may have been instigator Sunday,  July 27, 2008 3:28 AM By Jeb Phillips
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Matthew Edblom

Not much good happens at 1766 S. 8th St.

The tenants either seem to be looking for trouble, or trouble comes looking for them. In November 2007, a man moved in. By early December, he’d been robbed and killed there. That was before he could be brought to trial for robbing and assaulting someone himself.

Angelina Edblom saw that man’s body lying on the ground in late 2007. She lived about 50 yards down the South Side alley with three of her children and her husband, Matthew. So they already were fed up with the people 1766 attracted when the new crew moved in not long after the murder.

Then it got worse, she and other neighbors said.

Other neighbors remember seeing chaos at 1766 almost every night — lots of traffic at all hours, lots of noise. The landlord, Philip Reynolds of Orient, insists he kept renting to respectable people only to have others move in under his nose. He said the new tenants put up surveillance cameras and got a pit bull.

Everyone assumed they were dealing drugs. About 4 a.m. on Feb. 14, Matthew Edblom decided to do something. He walked down the alley to confront the people at 1766. His wife heard the sirens 20 minutes later.

What she said then, and what she still believes, is that her 32-year-old husband was killed protecting his family. Her children had seen drug transactions, and he didn’t want them exposed to it anymore.

“He was a compassionate, loving man,” Angelina Edblom said last week. “He was a good Christian man.”

That’s true, said those who knew him. But court records indicate that at times, he could be a violent man as well.

On Monday, the Franklin County grand jury decided not to indict the two people involved in Edblom’s death. Testimony in front of the grand jury and its deliberations are secret, but much of the evidence in the case points to self-defense, said Columbus homicide detective Donald Sowards, the lead investigator.

Witnesses said that Edblom went to 1766 with two knives. He confronted Israel Lee outside, then followed him inside. Lee repeatedly asked Edblom to leave while Edblom was holding the knives and yelling about the place as a “crack house.”

Lee, 35, grabbed a shotgun and fired it into a wall as a warning shot, Sowards said. Then he pointed the gun at Edblom. Another man, Shawn Kilgore, 42, came up behind Edblom and told him to leave. They started fighting, and the struggle took them back outside. Kilgore managed to get one of the knives away from Edblom and stabbed him three times. Edblom died 30 minutes later at Grant Medical Center.

His wife said she couldn’t believe that it happened that way. From a photo of the crime scene, she has decided that her husband was attacked outside and killed there. He didn’t instigate the fight, she said.

But the grand jury saw the coroner’s report too. Matthew Edblom’s blood-alcohol level was 0.14 percent, nearly two times the level at which Ohio law considers a driver to be drunk. And his body had high concentrations of chemicals found in over-the-counter cough and cold medicine. One, dextromethorphan, can be a hallucinogen in large doses.

His wife said last week that she didn’t know that. (She didn’t know that he was drinking cough syrup or she didn’t know it could cause hallucinations???)

The grand jury likely didn’t see evidence of past troubles, but just a month before he died, he was charged with assault and domestic violence for punching his wife in the face. She said that occurred when he “blacked out” because of an illness. She didn’t know that he had been charged. (Ummm, just so she knows, blackouts aren’t usually part of the common cold – although they are part of an illness known as alcoholism. )

In 2005, a Franklin County Domestic Court judge issued a protection order against Edblom, saying he had to stay away from a former fiancee. Jamie Radich said that he had hit and sexually assaulted her when they were engaged.

“When he was sweet, he was very, very sweet,” she said, when reached at her home in Minnesota last week. “He struggled with a lot of inner demons. He wanted to be a good person and a family man, but he abused over-the-counter drugs.”

She had been shocked to hear of his death, but not of the way it happened.

“He would get completely irrational,” she said. (Yeahhhhhh, drugs and alcohol can do that to you.)

Israel Lee, the man that Edblom decided to confront at 4 a.m., has a violent criminal history going back nine years. He is in jail now on a count of attempted murder in a shooting on July 13. Shawn Kilgore pleaded guilty in April to a charge of domestic violence for hitting his girlfriend on the legs with a metal chair. He was placed on probation but is scheduled for a revocation hearing this week because he hasn’t kept in touch with his probation officer.

Neither of those cases appears to be related to Edblom’s death.

Edblom’s wife has moved with her children to the West Side. She said financial difficulties have forced her from place to place.

And 1766 S. 8th St. sits empty, the landlord said. Past tenants caused so much damage that it’s now uninhabitable.