Columbus man who left gunshot victim at hospital pleads in homicide case

A Columbus man has pleaded guilty to a lesser offense after he initially was charged with involuntary manslaughter in a 2015 fatal shooting in which the prime suspect later was gunned down, too.

Joseph Delaney Kimble pleaded guilty to giving police false information regarding the July 4, 2015, death of Blake Bernard Berry, 24, who died from multiple gunshot wounds after Kimble dropped him off at The Midtown Medical Center.

After his guilty plea, Kimble was sentenced to five years’ probation with 12 months to serve. He was released, having served longer than that after his arrest Sept. 15, 2015, when police charged him with involuntary manslaughter, reckless conduct, being a convicted felon with a firearm, tampering with evidence and giving officers false statements.

Police said they never believed Kimble shot Berry, but he hosted an Independence Day “house party” at 316 Bragg Smith St. where Berry fatally was wounded. Kimble then drove Berry to the hospital and left him there without reporting the crime, and later impeded the investigation by hiding a gun Berry had and lying to officers about what happened.

Kimble’s attorney, William Kendrick, said detectives charged Kimble with manslaughter to pressure him to be more forthcoming.

Suspect killed

Berry’s homicide later became interwoven with other deaths after authorities in September 2015 identified a suspect, Terry Cobb, 29, and asked the public to help locate him.

They found him almost exactly a year after Berry’s death – around 5 a.m. on July 3, 2016, at Cusseta Road and 21st Ave., where he was mortally wounded. Like Berry, Cobb was pronounced dead shortly after 6 a.m. at the Midtown Medical Center.

Cobb’s death closely followed that of a brother, also fatally shot.

That brother, Kenneth “Baby Kenny" Holloway Jr., 25, was shot around 10:15 p.m. June 18, 2016, at 406 17th Ave., where he had an argument with a man said to be his friend. Police charged 31-year-old Torrance Terrell Menefee in that incident, which Menefee’s attorney Stacey Jackson described as a “self-defense case.”

The brothers’ mother

In follow-up reports on the brothers’ homicides, the Ledger-Enquirer in September 2016 interviewed their mother, Ruby Dee Cobb, who was then undergoing radiation and chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer.

Cobb, who had seven sons, already had lost one in a 1993 fire at Wilson Apartments, when the infant was only six months old.

She spoke of how close Menefee had been to her family.

“I braid hair, and he came here every two weeks to get his hair braided,” she said. “Then he just got attached to our family. He was like, ‘I like your boys. They’re so respectable, you know. You’re like my second mom.’”

She said Menefee and Holloway had been drinking at her home shortly before the shooting.

Ruby Dee Cobb died Nov. 2, 2016, at age 53. A sister said the stress of her sons’ deaths had weakened her, causing her to lose weight. She was hospitalized before transferring to hospice and then requesting she return to her Mason Street home.

Her sister said Cobb’s mother died in 1984, when Cobb at age 20 took on the task of raising two siblings along with her sons.

“It was like 10 of us when we were coming up in a five-bedroom at Elizabeth Canty,” the sister said of the Canty public housing project. “But she took care of all of us … You need some place to stay, she’s going to let you stay. You need something to eat, she’s going to feed you. That’s just the type of person she was. She don’t discriminate or turn her back on nobody, and she’s always been like that.”

She died on her youngest son’s 23rd birthday. The sister said Cobb began to doze off, and then called out each son’s name before she quit breathing.

This story was originally published December 26, 2017 at 12:58 PM with the headline "Columbus man who left gunshot victim at hospital pleads in homicide case."