Investigation nets Grube murder arrests

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

CELINA — It has taken 16 months of hard work and many hours of investigation, and will likely take many more months of legal wrangling, but Mercer County authorities finally think they have the person primarily responsible for the killing of Robert and Colleen Grube.

Trevin M. Sanders, 18, of Union City, a small town about 20 minutes from Fort Recovery on the Ohio-Indiana border, has been charged with 27 counts that include aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, and aggravated burglary, along with firearms specifications, enough to put him behind bars for the rest of his life if convicted.

Another man, Bryant L. Rhoades, 22, also of Union City, has been charged with felony obstructing justice for providing false information about the case to investigators.

Sanders is currently serving time in a Michigan City, Ind., prison on unrelated charges, while Rhoades is being held in Mercer County on a $3.5 million bond. With the case now turned over to Mercer County Prosecutor Matt Fox, efforts to extradite Sanders to Ohio will quickly move forward so that he can stand trial for killing the rural Fort Recovery man and his caretaker daughter.

That process will be complicated, though, by the fact that Sanders was just 17, legally a juvenile, at the time he allegedly committed the murders. Following his extradition, the teenager must first appear in Mercer County Juvenile Court for an amenability hearing to decide whether he should be tried as an adult. If that determination is made, the case would then go to the Mercer County Grand Jury, which would have to hand down indictments on Sanders related to the case.

Meanwhile, Mercer County Sheriff Jeff Grey said his investigation of the Grube case, which has already encompassed thousands of man-hours and involved 329 interviews, would continue to ensure that all those involved in the murders of the Fort Recovery residents are brought to justice.

“Like I’ve said from the beginning, it’s only halftime right now,” the sheriff said. “We’ve made an arrest, but the goal wasn’t an arrest, the goal is a conviction.”

Sheriff Grey also stressed on Wednesday that the investigation into the deaths of Robert and Colleen Grube never faltered.

“One of the things I want to stress during that 16 months is this case has never been cold,” the sheriff said, adding that investigators have traveled all the way to Kentucky and Tennessee investigating leads in the case.

While Sheriff Grey thanked a number of people, including his own investigators, other law enforcement agencies in Ohio and Indiana, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and his Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (known as BCI), and the U.S. Marshal’s Service, he was particularly grateful to Sheriff Ray Newton of Jay County, one of two Indiana counties that borders Mercer County (Adams County is the other). It was the Jay County sheriff and his department that provided what Grey called “the turning point” in the Grube investigation back in January 2012.

At that time, the Indiana sheriff called his Mercer County counterpart to tell him of several arrests made in Jay County that he thought might have some bearing on the Grube case. The call was enough to send Mercer County investigators — and eventually Sheriff Grey himself — to Indiana to look at evidence discovered by Sheriff Newton and his deputies.

“I’m going to say that was probably the turning point, in (that) the information that came out of that helped us start putting things together and getting us on the right track,” Sheriff Grey said on Wednesday.

But the Mercer County sheriff also said he wants people with information on the case to continue calling his department.

“We want to make sure we get everyone that was involved,” Sheriff Grey said. “I don’t want people to just walk away and go ‘they made an arrest, it’s done; I don’t need to give them the information.”