PREBLE COUNTY — Investigators said a man had a machete, slashed a woman’s leg, killing her.
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News Center 7’s John Bedell went through 90 minutes of cruiser camera footage from the crime.
The video showed that at first, deputies did not believe the witness’s story.
He told deputies exactly what investigators say they later determined happened.
But right off the bat, this video shows deputies did not believe the story they were getting.
When Preble County deputies pulled up to the home Sunday night, they found Leigha Huff lying dead.
She had a cut on her leg.
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This is how one deputy reacted to the story he got about how it happened.
“Okay, but that just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Huff was with a witness, a man Huff knew, at his friend’s house here near Gratis.
Then, she hopped on the back of his motorcycle for the drive back to his home in Eaton.
The witness told deputies what happened minutes later.
“I seen some guy running down his driveway. It looked like he was swinging something on a rope. Like, I don’t know, it had to be a blade, something sharp, evidently,” he said. “And she goes, ‘I’m cut, I cut.’”
He said he drove to his friend’s house, where they called 911.
As deputies heard his story, they told each other they think he probably crashed.
“Yeah, I don’t buy it. I -- honestly, I’m gonna drive by where he said that this person did. And I guarantee I’m going to see stuff on a guardrail,” a deputy said.
But deputies say they later confirmed the witness’s story when they showed up at a house on Upper Somers Road near Camden.
Five minutes before that 911 call, the suspect’s daughter made a call to dispatchers:
“My ex is running up and down the road on his motorcycle, revving it up, trying to get my dad to come out. My dad is outside,” she told dispatchers.
But the sheriff said they found the ex was not on that road, and the suspect, Kenneth Brabant, swung a machete, killing Huff, a victim he did not know.
Brabant is in jail.
A judge told him he needs $1 million to change that.
If he gets out, he’ll be on house arrest with a GPS ankle monitor.
A representative for his lawyer’s office told News Center 7, “No comment.”
He’s due in court again next week.
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