September 16, 2021

Echoes from Floral Circle

5 Unsettling Realities Behind a 2.5-Hour Crime Wave

On the late afternoon of Thursday, September 16, 2021, the heavy humidity of a Columbus summer was punctured by a sound Sarah Marshall initially dismissed as a stray firecracker.

Marshall, an employee of the City Attorney’s Office, was watching television in her home on Pamlico Street when the pop echoed through the neighborhood. Her professional instincts, honed by the machinery of the legal system, prompted her to open her door.

What she heard next was the sound of a community’s peace disintegrating: a woman’s voice, raw and screaming, “I can’t believe you just shot someone! You just shot someone!” Behind the screen of trees along the fence line of the Autumn Springs Apartments, 24-year-old Bryce K. Persang was slumped in the passenger seat of a silver Honda Fit, his life escaping through a single wound to his chest.

1. The Playground Paradox: Violence in Common Spaces

The geography of the Autumn Springs complex creates a haunting juxtaposition of domesticity and danger. The entrance to the apartments sits off Norton Road, tucked between a bustling gas station and a neighborhood Catholic school. It is a “residential labyrinth” where the mundane patterns of family life—trips to the store, children walking from school—intersect with the stark architecture of a crime scene.

The shooting occurred near a fence line that serves as a boundary between the apartment complex and a neighboring condo community. This area is not a secluded alleyway, but a common space designed for leisure. Sarah Marshall’s primary motivation for calling authorities was the knowledge that the trajectory of that single bullet had passed through an area where the neighborhood’s most vulnerable are usually found.

“I just wanted to report that I believe there was a gunshot near where children could be playing… there is like a playground area kind of near where the fence line is between this apartment complex and where the condo is.”

— Sarah Marshall, City Attorney’s Office Employee

2. The Chaos of the 911 Call: A Girlfriend’s Desperate Minutes

The emergency transcripts from that afternoon provide a visceral window into the clinical transition from life to death. When Persang’s girlfriend called 911, the disorientation was absolute. Trapped in a silver hatchback with a dying man, she struggled to navigate the “Senco,” “Soco,” and “Sunoco” gas stations along Norton Road, her location shifting as she considered driving him to safety herself.

“Baby breathe. Baby,” she pleaded, a heartbreaking refrain captured on the recording. She described him as becoming “heavy” and “drooling,” signs of a body entering the final stages of trauma. Without medical supplies or even a clean towel to stanch the bleeding, she was left to use her bare hands against a wound that was rapidly claiming him. The dispatcher’s struggle to pin down her location—caught between the “North” at the Sunoco and the Floral Circle South address—underscores the terrifying isolation that occurs when violence disrupts the familiar grid of a residential neighborhood.

3. A City Under Pressure: Two Murders in 150 Minutes

To understand the atmosphere in Columbus that Thursday, one must look at the clock. Bryce Persang was the second victim of a violent 150-minute window that pushed the city into a “Crime Alert” status.

At 3:11 p.m., the University District was rocked by the shooting of 24-year-old Quinten Fuller in the 1900 block of North 4th Street. Fuller was rushed to Ohio Health Grant Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. By 5:40 p.m., while detectives were still processing the University District scene, the calls for Floral Circle South began to flood dispatch. The rapid succession of these homicides—Fuller in the north and Persang in the west—strained the city’s emergency infrastructure. While Fuller’s life ended at Grant, Persang was transported to Doctors Hospital on West Broad Street, where he was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m. It was a day where the city’s peace wasn’t just broken; it was systematically dismantled.

4. The Forensic Fingerprint: What the Autopsy Reveals

The forensic report from the Franklin County Forensic Science Center strips away the chaos of the screaming witnesses and the frantic 911 calls, leaving behind a clinical record of a life interrupted. Dr. Anne Shepler’s autopsy describes Persang not just as a case number, but as a young man with red-brown hair and hazel eyes, wearing a mustache and goatee. He was found with two necklaces around his neck and a bracelet on his left wrist—small, personal effects that survived the violence of the afternoon.

The medical reality of the “firecracker” sound was a single gunshot wound to the torso. The bullet entered the medial chest, just half an inch to the right of the midline, and followed a trajectory that was front to back, left to right, and slightly downward. It shattered the right second and third ribs and tore through all lobes of the right lung, causing a hemothorax—700 mL of blood pooling in the pleural cavity. Despite the violence of his end, Persang’s toxicology showed only the presence of THC and Cotinine; he was a “normally developed” 24-year-old whose physical future was erased in the time it takes to pull a trigger.

5. The Long Road to Accountability

Justice for the Persang family followed a timeline as grueling as the shooting was sudden. While the violence occurred in September 2021, the clinical finality of the signed autopsy report did not arrive until March 30, 2022. For Bryce’s mother, Katherine Persang, the nightmare began with a 3:00 a.m. knock on her door on Friday morning—detectives arriving to confirm what the neighborhood already knew. In a cruel twist of timing, Bryce’s sister had heard the sirens of the responding emergency vehicles on her way to work Thursday evening, unaware they were screaming for her brother just a mile from her home.

The investigation eventually identified two suspects: 20-year-old Tahir Said and 19-year-old Hanut Abdulle.

Both were charged with murder, representing the legal end of a process that began with a woman’s scream on a quiet Thursday.

Conclusion: The Silence After the Sirens

The single gunshot fired on Floral Circle South did more than end the life of Bryce Persang; it permanently altered the frequency of the neighborhood. It turned a silver Honda Fit into a tomb and transformed a common playground into a site of forensic measurement.

When “common spaces” become the backdrop for homicides, the community is left with scars that no police report can fully document. As the yellow tape is cleared and the sirens fade, a haunting question remains for the residents of Autumn Springs and beyond: How do children return to the swings when the last thing they heard in that space was the sound of a life being taken? The events of September 16, 2021, serve as a chilling reminder of the fragility of the urban peace and the heavy weight of the silence that follows the sirens.

WANTED

Anyone with any information on the whereabouts of Hanut Abdulle and Tahir Said Call Crime Stoppers at 614-461-8477 or go to their website at http://www.stopcrime.org and email your tip. You will remain anonymous. Or please contact the Columbus Police Homicide Department at 614-645-4730

More to Come…

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