Police Hunt Down Teens After Terrifying Shooting Spree

The streets of East Price Hill have a way of swallowing secrets, but on May 1, 2025, the neighborhood was screaming. It started with a stolen car—a mundane piece of paperwork for the Edgewood Police Department in Kentucky until the GPS pinged across the river in Cincinnati. By the time the local cruisers caught sight of the vehicle on Warsaw Avenue, it wasn’t just a “stolen recovery” anymore. It was a rolling crime scene linked to a neighborhood shooting spree.

Inside that car sat three young men: Ryan Hinton, DeAnthony Bulocks, and Jerel Austin. They were the kind of trio that represents a recurring nightmare for urban law enforcement—mobile, desperate, and, as the officers would soon learn, armed with more than just a desire to escape. When the blue and red lights finally bloomed in their rearview mirror, the car didn’t slowly pull to the curb. It became a catapult. The doors flew open before the wheels had even stopped spinning, and the three suspects vanished into the labyrinth of alleys and wooded ravines that define the Price Hill landscape.

The Fog of the Manhunt

What followed was a masterclass in the chaotic inefficiency of high-stakes policing. For hours, Cincinnati was a war zone of “near misses” and “wrong guys.” The air was thick with the hum of drones and the frantic barking of K-9 units, yet the police spent the better part of the afternoon harassing the innocent.

Nearly two miles from the original drop point, officers converged on a local library. They saw a young man. He matched the description—or rather, he matched the vague, racially coded profile that often suffices for a description in the heat of a manhunt. They slammed him against the pavement, shouting for him to put his hands behind his back.

“I did not do nothing, bro!” the man screamed, his voice cracking with the terror of someone staring down the barrel of a state-issued handgun. “I’ve been chilling! I just came outside! I’m on the phone with my brother!”

The officers didn’t care about his phone call. They cared about the “homicide” they thought they were solving. They dragged him to the station, ran a Gunshot Residue (GSR) test on his hands, and waited. The results came back clean. No lead. No sulfur. Just a terrified civilian who had the misfortune of walking to the library on the wrong Tuesday.

“If I did something and seen y’all pulling up, I would have ran,” the man told them after they took the cuffs off. It was a biting piece of logic that the police, in their tactical fervor, had completely overlooked. He hadn’t run because he had no reason to. The actual suspects, meanwhile, were deep in the brush, watching the drones circle like vultures.

The Pincer and the Woods

While the police were busy apologizing to the man at the library, a new variable entered the equation. A frantic 911 call came from a single mother a few miles away. Someone had broken into her car and snatched her firearm. She was terrified—not just of the loss, but of the potential for her name to be linked to whatever blood was about to be spilled. She didn’t know the serial number; she didn’t know the ATF protocols. She just knew that a gun was now in the hands of the desperate.

The search narrowed. Using a tactical maneuver known as a “pincer movement,” SWAT and patrol units began to squeeze the wooded areas near Mount Hope. They moved like a closing fist—one team creating a loud, distracting perimeter at the front, while another slipped through the shadows of the rear.

DeAnthony Bulocks was the first to fall. A drone spotted him darting through the trees, his white shirt a beacon against the spring greenery. When the officers closed in, the bravado of the “shooting spree” evaporated. He was just a nineteen-year-old caught in a trap. Shortly after, Jerel Austin was intercepted near Glenway. Like the man at the library, he tried the “I’m just going to work” defense, but the sweat and the scent of the woods gave him away.

But as the zip-ties clicked shut on Bulocks and Austin, a chilling realization settled over the scene. The gun—the one stolen from the mother’s car, the one used in the earlier shooting—wasn’t on them.

The third man, eighteen-year-old Ryan Hinton, was still out there. And he was the one carrying the weight.

Five Shots in the Brush

The final act played out in a backyard on Grand Avenue. A homeowner reported a shadow moving through the brush. Officers, now weary and hyper-alert, pushed into the dense foliage. The “routine” nature of the day had long since vanished, replaced by the jagged adrenaline of a lethal encounter.

“He’s got a gun! On your right! He’s got a gun!”

The command was followed by the deafening crack of service weapons. Five shots. In the confined space of the woods, the sound was physical, a wall of noise that ended the manhunt instantly.

Ryan Hinton didn’t die immediately. He lay in the dirt, pleading for help as the very men who had shot him began to transition into the role of first responders. They called for the “bus”—the ambulance—and began chest compressions, but the damage was done. A single 9mm round had entered under his left arm, punched through his chest, and shredded his heart. It was a “fatal-four” injury, a wound that no amount of field gauze could fix.

By the time the sun began to set over Cincinnati, the three suspects were accounted for: two in interrogation rooms, and one on a cold table at the morgue.

The Aftermath of Hypocrisy

The tragedy of the Hinton case didn’t end with the autopsy. It sparked a cycle of reactionary violence and systemic failure that highlighted the hypocrisy of the entire ordeal. The police, who had spent the day arresting the wrong people and ultimately killing a teenager, claimed they acted in self-defense against a pointed weapon. The family, fueled by the agonizing grief of a grandmother who arrived at the scene only to be told her grandson was “at the hospital,” demanded a justice that the system was ill-equipped to provide.

The most jarring fallout occurred just days later. Ryan’s father, Rodney Hinton Jr., consumed by a grief that morphed into a misplaced war, allegedly drove his vehicle into a Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy during a protest. In an attempt to avenge a son lost to violence, he ensured his own incarceration for aggravated murder, leaving a family not just mourning one life, but decimated by the loss of two.

DeAnthony Bulocks and Jerel Austin eventually sat in those small, fluorescent-lit rooms and admitted they were in the car. They admitted they ran. But they maintained they never pulled a trigger. In the end, they pleaded guilty to obstructing official business—a minor legal footnote to a day that cost a life, ruined a father, and left a neighborhood wondering if the “protection” offered by the sirens was worth the price of the silence that followed.