A little more than two years after Springdale police officer Kaia Grant's death, officials unveiled signs that will stand on I-275, declaring the stretch of highway that runs through Springdale as the "Officer Kaia L. Grant Memorial Highway."
Early Friday morning, Springdale Police Chief Thomas Wells, Springdale Mayor Doyle Webster, State Representative Jessica Miranda, ODOT officials and Grant's family were on hand for the sign's unveiling.
On March 21, 2020, Springdale police officers were helping Elmwood Place police with a suspect who drove away as officers tried to pull him over. Grant and her partner were in the middle of putting down stop sticks in the road when police said 42-year-old Terry Blankenship intentionally crashed into their two cruisers near State Route 4.
Grant was taken to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where she was pronounced dead.
Blankenship was wanted on a felony warrant from Blanchester, Ohio. Police there said he broke into his ex-wife's trailer, pistol-whipped her boyfriend and threatened to kill him.
After the crash, Blankenship shot himself in the head inside his truck, but survived.
In May of 2020, Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters announced that he intended to seek the death penalty for Blankenship. Instead, Blankenship pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in 2021 as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed to not seek a death sentence.
Grant was laid to rest on March 29, 2020. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, people lined the streets along the procession route to pay their respects to the officer killed in the line of duty. A memorial sprang up outside the Springdale Police Department, where police parked a cruiser draped in a black cloth to show their mourning.
On the first anniversary of Grant's death, her family, friends and fellow officers gathered to honor her memory in a ceremony. Her locker was displayed as she left it when she responded to the call that ended her life.
At the time, Wells said he intended to leave the locker in the department's locker room as a time capsule until 2037, the year when Grant would have been able to retire.
Grant, 33, was born and raised in Wyoming, Ohio, and graduated from Wyoming High School in 2005. She had been an officer with the Springdale Police Department for just over 7 years and was the first Springdale officer killed in the line of duty.
Grant was also the first female officer in the Tri-State to die in the line of duty outside of a jail, according to the Police Museum website. The site records 206 local, state and federal officers killed since 1845 and lists only two other women. Both were jail matrons killed on the job more than 100 years ago, Rosa A. Regan in 1908 and Anna M. Hart in 1916.
