Three years ago today Terris Ross, an Ohio University senior, was shot and killed in the University Commons parking lot. The death of someone so young always is sad, but it means a lot more in a place like Athens, where murder blessedly is uncommon.
Ross' fiancee, Angel, and his mother, Dorothy Gamble, are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of catching the person who killed Terris on that tragic night (see today's front-page story). And you can't blame them. The case has grown cold, and as the weeks and months pass, the chances grow even slimmer that Ross' killer will be caught - only a minuscule percentage of unsolved murder cases are solved after lying dormant for this long.
That the case remaining unsolved casts a negative light upon local police is obvious - when faced with one of the biggest crimes in Athens in the past decade, the police have been unable to make any significant headway toward bringing the killer to justice. For all we know, he or she might still be in our midst. But the Ross case is about a lot more, and it raises questions most would surely like to avoid.
The Ross case, combined with another unsolved Athens killing - a drive-by shooting that killed a student on Franklin Street in 1991 - both have alleged links to drugs. We have to ask ourselves if these killings are part of some seedy underbelly in our quaint little college town - and if a drug culture beyond the obvious and innocent (marijuana) is more potent than we might like to believe.
This is all the more reason for police to double their efforts to find Ross' killer. As long as he or she evades justice, local residents and students won't know what to believe.
Ross' death was a jarring event for Athens and remains an open sore for those who remember it. Most of the students who were on campus when Ross was killed have graduated, and come June almost all will be gone. But Athens, and its police, cannot forget about Ross, or the difficult questions his death raises.
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Tough questions about Ross killing
