On the warm Monday night of August 18, 2025, just after 8 p.m., police were sent to the 6000 block of Ambleside Drive on Columbus' north side near Devonshire Park. There they found Chad W. Thomas Sr., 51, a male, Black, unresponsive on the pavement. Medics took over within minutes, but he was pronounced dead at 8:28 p.m., his final moments recorded in the brisk cadence of a police media sheet as detectives moved to secure the scene and the night air filled with cruiser lights and whispered
questions from neighbors.
According to charging documents described in local reporting, the violence followed a family dispute that drew in a 26-year-old cousin, Antwan Thomas. He arrived after being called to pick up a relative, telling Chad Thomas Sr. that if he wanted a fight, he could fight him instead. Words sharpened; Thomas Sr. replied that he wasn't going to fight—he was going to kill him. Antwan stepped to his car, retrieved a gun, and with his back momentarily turned as Thomas Sr. advanced, opened fire. In a stark statement to detectives later, he allegedly said, “I shot him until the gun ran out of bullets.”
Officers took Antwan D. Thomas into custody that night. By the time the official release went out, he had been interviewed, processed, and charged with murder, then slated to the Franklin County Jail; an arraignment in Franklin County Municipal Court was expected to follow. The bulletin lists Detective Soviak as lead, assisted by Detective M.T. Smith, and asks anyone with information to call the Homicide Unit or Central Ohio Crime Stoppers as the case moves from a cordoned street to the slow, procedural grind of court.
News trackers and victim memorials fixed the place and date—north Columbus, August 18—alongside the terse lines of the police chronology, a mosaic of fragments that together sketch a life ended and an arrest made. They add little flourish, only confirmation, anchoring the official account with the same address and the same loss.
