More than 50 years after Cincinnati police officer David Cole was fatally shot in the line of duty, his widow is once again asking the state to keep his killer behind bars. Cheryl Cole-Candelaresi spoke at a news conference on Thursday, November 5, ahead of a January appearance by Roland Reaves, now 75, before the Ohio Parole Board, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Reaves has repeatedly been denied parole since his 1974 aggravated murder conviction in Cole’s killing.
“We have spent a lifetime trying to keep him in jail,” Cole-Candelaresi told reporters at the November 5 press conference, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. “And he needs to stay there.” She was 23 when her husband was killed, and the Enquirer reported she has had to make a public plea roughly every decade as Reaves came up for parole again.
Cole, a 24-year-old patrolman, was shot early on July 17, 1974, while responding to a report of someone on the roof of a United Dairy Farmers store on Florence Avenue in Walnut Hills, according to the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office. The prosecutor’s office says Reaves and Ricardo Woods had planned to rob the store, a concerned citizen called police, and Cole responded and pulled alongside the two men before gunfire erupted.
Both men were convicted, and Reaves was sentenced to death, according to the prosecutor’s office, but that sentence was overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated many state death penalty schemes in the late 1970s. Cincinnati police union president Ken Kober told the Cincinnati Enquirer that Ohio law did not include a life-without-parole sentence at the time of the conviction, which is why Reaves has been able to petition repeatedly for early release. Woods was paroled in 1994, the Enquirer reported.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich is urging the public to submit letters to the parole board opposing Reaves’ release. “He’s a cop killer. I believe he’ll do it again,” Pillich said, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. The prosecutor’s office states on its website that it “strongly opposes any type of parole or release of Roland Reaves for the rest of his natural life,” calling him a substantial risk to the community.
Reaves has been an inmate of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction since January 1975 and is currently housed at the Pickaway Correctional Institution in Orient, Ohio, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Cole-Candelaresi also said Reaves has never been held criminally accountable for his role in the death of his wife in Chicago before he fled to Ohio, the Enquirer reported.
What happens next is the January parole board proceeding, where members will consider Reaves’ record, the circumstances of Cole’s killing and letters submitted for and against release. Letters opposing parole can be submitted through the prosecutor’s office website at hcpros.org or the police union’s page at fop69.org, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. For Cole’s family, the outcome decides whether a fight lasting more than five decades continues — or whether the man convicted of killing a 24-year-old officer walks free.