Police in Chillicothe say 16-year-old Jacob Wolfe was riding on the hood of a 1991 Honda driven by another teen in a Walmart parking lot. He fell off and suffered a severe head injury.

Wolfe died as a result of the injury on Sunday afternoon.

Police are still investigating the incident, but no charges are expected.

Pastors and grief counselors were to be available Monday to help his fellow Chillicothe High School students cope with the loss.

Hocking County Common Pleas Judge John Wallace said Tuesday that William Inman Sr.’s trial will be held in Chillicothe in Ross County. Wallace earlier granted the change-of-venue motion by Inman’s attorneys. Wallace said too many prospective jurors knew the facts of the case and had decided the question of Inman’s guilt.

The 48-year-old Inman is charged with aggravated murder and other crimes in the March 2011 slaying of 25-year-old Summer Inman. He faces a possible death penalty if convicted.

Inman’s wife and son were convicted earlier this year in the slaying.

The Hopewell Culture National Historical Park traces a culture that goes back 12,000 years.

Dick Shiels is the Director of the Newark Earthwork Center. He is an expert on the Hopewell Culture that that was in this part of Ohio between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500.

There were mounds all over Ohio. They are what I call little humpy mounds. That look like hills that were built in what we call the Adena period. Roughly 800 to 300 BC. There were massive geometric enclosures built between 100 BC and 300 AD. Circle squares and polygons and funny shapes that you could walk into.

We know of 600 sites within Ohio where there were earthen enclosures.

“We believe that our best interpretations of these sites is that they were ceremonial sites that people came to from great distances for ceremony,” Shiels says.

That is, to say, they were places of pilgrimage.

The Hopewell Culture National Historical Park preserves earthwork complexes which are on several acres of land right behind the Center. Jeff Gill is a program assistant for the Newark Earthworks Center at the Ohio State University Newark campus.

“Groups followed new ecosystems, following new practices. In the Hopewell period we’re often looking for the confluence of rivers, second terraces with good drainage. Springs just above and nice river valley below.”

Turns out a good place to build a geometric earthwork complex is also a really good place to build a modern American town. People didn’t set out in the early stages, to destroy them. But they built in them.

Archeologists have documented thousands of sites in the Ohio River valley but few have survived intact. The mounds here were threatened, and saved, by one event.

Kevin Coleman is a local historian.

Connected with the Hopewell, for better or worse, is Camp Sherman. That was a large army training camp that was built here during WWI, in 1917. Although, it helped further destroy Mound City here at the park, it also led to its reconstruction and preservation of the park.

1,370 buildings, in an extensive complex, were constructed in the rush to get soldiers trained for the Great War.

Camp Sherman became the 3rd largest training camp in the nation. Before the war was over more than 40,000 soldiers had trained there. After the war the camp was dismantelled and, in 1920, archeological digs began to amass a collection of more than 167,000 Hopewell artifacts.

Today, throughout the Chillicothe area you can find great examples of Native American Earthworks. Some survived the settlers and some are finely constructed re-creations.

You can download an audio tour of Zane’s Trace – A Road into the Wilderness at SeeOhioFirst.org.

The New Ohio Guide is produced by the Ohio Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The U.S. Department of Energy will ensure cost-shared funding in a deal with USEC Inc. for the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, just south of Chillicothe.

The department said Wednesday the cooperative agreement will move critical research forward while protecting taxpayer dollars.

The $350 million project is meant to demonstrate that the uranium enrichment technology will work on a commercial basis, reducing financial risks that have held up USEC’s application for a $2 billion loan guarantee for the plant.

The project has bipartisan support in Ohio, where it could create as many as 4,000 jobs in a struggling region.

The Highway Patrol says the crash occurred around 10 a.m. when the ambulance struck a truck carrying lumber that was stopped to make a left turn onto another road.

The patrol identified the ambulance driver as 21-year-old Cody King, of Chillicothe. The patient was 72-year-old Barbara McWhorter, also of Chillicothe.

Every city is a unique construct that is a reflection of the people who made it. But some cities are much more than that – they are symbols as well of something more than the people who live here.

Columbus is one of those cities as well.

Columbus is a created city. There was no city on the “High Banks opposite Franklinton at the Forks of the Scioto” until the Ohio General Assembly brought it into being two hundred years ago. The original capital of Ohio had been at Chillicothe and then at Zanesville and then back to Chillicothe all within the first decade of the state’s history. Yielding to pressure to locate the capital in the central part of the state, many potential towns had been examined. But in the end the Ohio General Assembly decided to do something rather bold and daring.

In this new state on the edge of the frontier – in a place where only a few years earlier Native Americans had lived for generations – Ohio decided to build an entirely new town to be its symbolic center of state power and authority.

For more than two centuries it has been just that. From modest beginnings with a two story brick statehouse the State of Ohio has become a place where historic things happen with a rather surprising regularity. And Columbus has been in the center of it all.

When the state decided it needed a new statehouse in the 1830’s, it did not build a common building. In the middle of a state with few roads of any kind, Ohio began to construct a building that was second only to the US capitol in size and grandeur. When the National Road came to Ohio, it passed through Columbus. When Ohio built a canal system and a rail system and a highway system, Columbus was linked to all of them.

The state built massive institutions to care for people in need – the blind, the deaf and the mentally ill and put them her in Columbus. It built one of the most progressive penitentiaries in America and put it “near” Columbus – “way out in the country” at Spring Street and Neil Avenue. And it built a one of the world’s great learning communities – The Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College – now The Ohio State University – and placed it in Columbus as well.

One might think that all of these great institutions as well as libraries, cultural institutions and a fabric of truly livable neighborhoods might produce some memorable people. And they have.

The list of truly remarkable people who have called Columbus home for a little while or for a lifetime is a rather long one. But as much as a city shapes its people with its streets and its structures and its sights and its sounds, the city is also a reflection of the people who have made it their own for more than two hundred years.

As we look back on this rather special birthday, we can see how the dreams we have had have defined who we have been. And they still are. That is the magic of Columbus and Ohio and America. We are and always have been a people reinventing, rediscovering and renewing ourselves. We are a restless people who have done many wonderful things. And we are about to do many more.

Columbus, Ohio, on its two hundredth birthday continues to be a radiant symbol in the center of a great state of the people who call it home.

The man’s wife says the two had a domestic dispute about “mental issues” and he threatened to burn their house down. Smoke was seen coming from the home after she had escaped.

WBEX-AM radio reports the man fired more than 10 shots into the neighborhood when police tried to move in. Police say he was under the influence of alcohol during the  altercation. The unidentified man now faces charges of domestic violence or domestic menacing and inducing panic.

Phone records show a Clifford Johnson living at the address of the standoff. Calls to the residence were not answered.

There’s new hope the city is also a financial bellwether after a state audit hinted Chillicothe might be turning an economic corner.

Chillicothe has a long, rich history. It became Ohio’s first capital in 1803 and has seen its share of booms and busts. That’s clear standing in downtown, where a mix of historic businesses and new businesses show the city is still evolving.

In recent years, it’s been more bust than boom.

“Everyone knows we’ve had financial trouble.”

Tom Spetnagel is the city auditor. He took office last year and had the tough task of laying off dozens of cops, fire fighters and other city workers to help plug a $2 million deficit. He says things were so tough.

“We had to lay off school crossing guards. Try telling that to parents who send their kids to school,” Spetnagel said.

The problems weren’t limited to the public sector. Major employers like the Kenworth Truck Company slashed position, cabinet maker Mill’s Pride closed its doors, and many of the small downtown shops on Paint Street were seeing fewer customers.

But that was a year ago. The city has since balanced its budget and in its latest audit, got a thumbs up from the state for getting its books in order.

And now many of those downtown businesses are seeing customers return.

Christa Montgomery owns Grinders Restaurant. She’s seen more people eating out lately and is, for the first time, staying open for dinner three nights a week.

“We’re waiting to see how that goes over, whether it takes off. We haven’t done much advertising, so we’re taking some time to see how that progresses. And we’ve debated doing some soft-serve ice cream. So we’re just keeping our possibilities open,” Montgomery said.

A few doors down, Molly Kunzelman helps a customer at Ivy’s Home and Garden. Kunzelman’s family owns the shop and she says the business struggled in recent years. But now she says “business is wonderful.” When asked about the mood of her customers and her view of a local recovery, she pauses before saying

“Optimistic. It’s obviously a topic of conversation that comes around, so it is an ongoing concern. And people put a lot more thought into their spending; there’s not a lot of frivolous spending.”

Well, except for Kathy Bruning. She’s buying an afghan and scarf, not because she needs them but because she says she likes to support the downtown businesses. She agrees with Kunzelman about the mood of the town.

“They’re optimistc, I think, yeah. Other than that little plant down there in Waverly, what’s it called, Mill’s Pride. But other than that I think everything seems to be pretty good,” Bruning says.

Back in Chillicothe city offices, auditor Tom Spetnagel says that vies well for the rest of the country.

“We’re definitely a bellweather community; as Chillicothe goes, so goes the nation. And I think as long as we continue to see signs that there’s a recovery, albeit a slow one, I think the rest of the nation will see the same thing,” Spetnagel says.

Racial epithets, a depiction of a lynching and the words “whites only” appear on the outside walls of a restroom in Chillicothe’s Strawser Park. The graffiti has been there for at least two weeks as city officials decide how best to remove it. Mayor Joe Sulzer says the city submitted the vandalism case to its insurance company but is unable to pay the $1000 deductible.

Parks and Recreation Director Cathy Primer says her employees need a sandblaster to remove the offensive material.

“This is probably a two or three day process that we’re going to have to pull employees off of other things in order to clean this up,” Primer says.

Primer says she thinks local young people are responsible for the graffiti.

“Probably three-fourths of the county is out of electric,” Hickey says. “We’re having a lot of calls for service; getting assistance for heat, getting family members to shelters, things of that nature.”

But according to Vinton County EMA director Tom Coelho, there are no shelters because most facilities in the county are without electricity or back-up generators. Coelho is advising residents to ‘shelter in place.’

In neighboring Ross County, EMA director David Bethel says that between 4,000 and 5,000 customers are without power.

“The roads are snow and ice covered, traffic is moving real slow and careful, we’re having a lot of power lines coming down. That’s causing a lot of folks not to have electric, and I think there are interruptions of cable and phone service,” Bethel says.

Even though most of the storm has left the state, an American Electric Power official says more and more people in Southern Ohio continue to lose their electric service. AEP spokeswoman Teri Flora:

“So far our numbers have been climbing instead of declining as we would have anticipated,” Flora says. “But because of the weather conditions down in southern Ohio more outages are being reported throughout the day. As limbs get heavier and heavier and the lines add weight, we knew that more outages would occur.”

Flora says a majority of the 122,000 customers without electricity are in the Athens, Chillicothe and Newark areas. She says it could be several days before all customers are back on-line.

“With an outage of this extent and with the damage that we’re seeing we know this will go well into the weekend until we have everyone restored,” Flora says.