Scioto River Drowning Victims Identified

Local News

There's a walk happening this Sunday at Riverside Crossing Park worth knowing about, and it's got a nice story behind it. The BrainWaves Project — a youth-led community group founded by local students — is hosting its Walk for Brain Health, timed to World Brain Day, to raise money for local neuroscience research.

The walk runs 9 a.m. to noon and takes participants across The Dublin Link, with food trucks from Eiffel Street Food and Zaki Grill on site. Registration is $15 a person, and organizers say every dollar raised goes toward local brain research.

If you're looking for an easy, feel-good way to spend a Sunday morning — and maybe support some ambitious local kids doing real work on a serious cause — this is a good one.

More info here.

Local News

City Barbeque opened its newest restaurant in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, this week — its second location in that state in under a year, following its debut in Johnson City back in December. Not exactly the kind of news that changes your day. But there's a better story underneath it: the company running that smoker in Tennessee still calls Dublin home.

Rick Malir and his wife, Bonnie Coley-Malir, started City Barbeque here in 1999, teaming up with a competition barbecue crew known as the Barbeque Boys and filling catering orders out of their own house while waiting for the first restaurant — an old doughnut shop in Upper Arlington — to actually open. Nearly three decades later, the company operates more than 70 locations across roughly a dozen states, still smoking everything on-site over hickory the same way it did on day one.

What's notable is that it never left. The corporate headquarters is still on Blazer Parkway, where the company's built out a training center and test kitchen to support all that growth, and where it's been recognized locally as a top employer in years past. Company leaders have said the decision to keep growing here rather than relocate comes down to the workforce and business environment Dublin offers — the kind of thing that's easy to take for granted until you notice how many companies this size end up moving their headquarters elsewhere.

The new Murfreesboro spot celebrated with a ribbon-cutting alongside the local chamber of commerce, and the first fifty customers in line walked away with branded gear and gift cards. Small-town fanfare for a place that started, not so long ago, in someone's Dublin kitchen.

Local News

Following up on the tragedy we mentioned yesterday: two of the five people who died in the Scioto River near O'Shaughnessy Reservoir Park have now been identified by Honduras's Foreign Ministry. The other three victims haven't been named yet.

The hardest part of this story: two young children, ages 4 to 6, were with their parents that evening and are now in the care of Franklin County Children Services. It was one of those children who ran to the road and flagged down a passing driver for help.

One more detail worth knowing, if you spend any time on that stretch of river yourself: according to a water gauge run by the U.S. Geological Survey near the dam, the river's flow rate had more than quadrupled over the three days leading up to the incident, and was running at more than double its average rate that day. Water can look calm on the surface and still be moving with real force underneath — exactly the kind of thing worth checking before anyone gets in.

Our thoughts are with everyone connected to this. The full story is here.