Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

CINCINNATI – Damion Dean, 29, of Cincinnati, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 120 months in prison for illegally possessing firearms and ammunition.

Benjamin C. Glassman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, and Trevor Velinor, Special Agent in Charge, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), announced the sentence handed down today by U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett.

According to court documents, ATF received credible information that Dean was involved in multiple shootings in the Price Hill and Over-the-Rhine neighborhoods and that he was selling firearms. Agents executed a controlled purchase of firearms from Dean and thereafter a search warrant.

They discovered he possessed eight firearms, an extended magazine and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

All of the firearms possessed by Dean were test-fired and the spent shell casings from the test-fires were entered into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN). NIBIN is a national database of digital images of spent bullets and cartridge cases that are found at crime scenes or test-fired from confiscated weapons. NIBIN allows firearms examiners and technicians to enter and electronically compare images of the markings made by a firearm on bullets and cartridge casings in order to identify potential matches between ballistics images.  

One of the handguns yielded a presumptive match, which was later confirmed by a toolmark examination, to shell casings recovered from a shooting that occurred in July 2016 in Lower Price Hill. Cell phone tower data records also place Dean’s cell phone in the area of the shooting and neighborhood video surveillance shows a shooter who looks like Dean and is wearing jewelry similar to his.

The intended target in that shooting suffered multiple gun wounds and spent several weeks in the intensive care unit following the shooting. A bullet also grazed a bystander causing injury.

“Gun violence in the community is a real threat every day, and tools like NIBIN are helping us address that threat more accurately than ever before,” U.S. Attorney Glassman said.

Dean pleaded guilty in February to one count of possessing a firearm as a convicted felon.

U.S. Attorney Glassman commended the cooperative investigation by the ATF, as well as Deputy Criminal Chief Emily N. Glatfelter and Assistant United States Attorney Ebunoluwa A. Taiwo, who are representing the United States in this case. 

# # #