Morning Read

OHIO MAN SENTENCED TO LIFE FOR KIDNAPPING, RAPE OF CHILD – Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney Justin Lovett announced that a Jackson man has been sentenced last week to serve life in prison without parole following his conviction for the 2013 rape and kidnapping of a six-year-old child.

Following a jury trial prosecuted jointly by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office and Attorney General DeWine’s Special Prosecutions Section in April, Zachary Dunn, 32, was found guilty of three counts of kidnapping with sexual motivation specifications, one count of abduction, one count of rape, two counts of gross sexual imposition, and one count of felonious assault.

Judge Christopher J. Regan sentenced Dunn to life in prison without parole.

“This defendant committed one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and with today’s sentence he will never have the chance to hurt another child ever again,” said Attorney General DeWine. “Those who target children in this state will be met with the full force of the law.”

“Zachary Dunn is a callous child predator who still shows no genuine remorse for the terrible acts he committed against a defenseless six-year-old girl, and he is most deserving of nothing less than the maximum possible punishment that was handed down today,” said Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney Justin Lovett.

Dunn was arrested in July 2013 after kidnapping the six-year-old girl from her Jackson home. Dunn sexually assaulted the victim and abandoned her in a Liberty Township cemetery before she managed to reach a nearby residence for help.

Members of Attorney General DeWine’s Crimes Against Children Critical Response Team assisted the Jackson Police Department, Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, and multiple other law enforcement and public safety agencies in the investigation and search for the child and suspect. The Jackson Police Department was the lead investigating agency on the case.

As part of the sentence, Judge Regan also classified Dunn as a Tier III sex offender.

OSU DEBUTS NEW MAP – The Ohio State University has gone live with its GIS Maps 1.0, a live Geographic Information System (GIS) map of the historic Columbus campus.

The public website at gismaps.osu.edu, developed by Woolpert, offers up-to-date information on the location of campus buses and routes, car2go vehicles and currently available parking spaces, as well as energy consumption by building.

The site also highlights static student amenities, such as building locations, blue emergency phones, bike racks, landscape data, handicapped parking and city bus routes.

For OSU employees with a user ID, the site provides further GIS information: utility line locations, road pavement conditions, building assessment data and building floor plans with associated space data.

Larisa Kruger, OSU GIS manager, said the 145-year-old public university had only disconnected datasets and localized desktop GIS prior to 2014.

Woolpert was hired to integrate the university’s myriad systems and existing tools and data, and make them obtainable by public and private users in both website and web application formats. Woolpert a national architecture, engineering and geospatial firm headquartered in Dayton.

“GIS Maps 1.0 brings information that had been available but was difficult to access, and puts in in one place that’s easy to get to,” said John Przybyla, Woolpert project manager. “GIS is not just designed to make maps; it’s a platform to bring together information from multiple locations into one easy, user-friendly environment.”

Joe Porostosky, OSU’s director of facilities information and technology services, lauded Woolpert’s ability to produce a high-quality product in a “very short and somewhat unreasonable time frame.”

Woolpert built the end-user application, implementing Esri’s ArcGIS software, in approximately four months.

“Our broad understanding of the technology needs of the university and needs of end users helped expedite the process,” Przybyla said. “Our work in higher education settings as a firm, our ability to leverage existing data and existing integration capabilities, and the fact that we have the technology to merge them into one was crucial in executing this project accurately and efficiently.”

STATE MEETING PLANNED – The Minority Business Advisory Council will meet on Wednesday, June 17, 2015 at 1 p.m. The meeting will be held in Columbus at the Vern Riffe Building, 77 South High St., on the 31st floor, in rooms South B & C. The Minority Business Advisory Council helps create policies and programming ideas to improve Ohio’s business climate for minority businesses.