TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) – As severe storms move through Northwest Ohio, FirstEnergy and Poweroutage.us are reporting thousands of customers without power.

As of 1:20 a.m., FirstEnergy’s outage map reported that 5,035 customers were without power. According to the map, a lot of FirstEnergy customers near Port Clinton, Fremont and Oak Harbor lost power.

A large outage covering an area south of Oak Harbor and north of Fremont was impacting more than 800 people. FirstEnergy also reported that 684 people in the Bowling Green area were without power. The map also showed that the storms caused 614 customers in Put-In-Bay to lose power.

Poweroutage.us reported that as of 12:50 a.m., 3,700 people in Hancock County and more than 1,000 in Wood County were without power. It also reported hundreds of outages in most Northwest Ohio counties.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio—Ohio lawmakers are trying to end the state’s years-long moratorium on executions by compelling state prison officials to seek federal help with obtaining long-sought lethal-injection drugs.

Under language added to the state’s massive budget bill on Tuesday, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction would be directed to “make every effort to acquire lethal injection drugs” in collaboration with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Prisons officials would be required to update lawmakers twice per year about the status of those efforts.

The state of Ohio hasn’t put anyone to death since 2018. That’s because Ohio, like other states, has struggled in recent years to obtain lethal-injection drugs from U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies, which have cut off sales on moral and legal grounds.

Gov. Mike DeWine has maintained a de facto moratorium on executions since taking office in 2019, saying no executions will take place while he’s governor unless lawmakers alter state law to permit alternative forms of execution. Since then, bills have been introduced to authorize executions using nitrogen gas and to abolish the state’s death penalty altogether, but neither passed.

DeWine, a Greene County Republican, has repeatedly expressed his concern that if pharmaceutical companies find that Ohio used their drugs to put people to death, they will refuse to sell any of their drugs (not just the ones used in executions) to the state. That would endanger the ability of thousands of Ohioans – such as Medicaid recipients, state troopers, and prison inmates – to get drugs through state programs.

The governor, who’s term-limited in 2026, has told reporters that he’ll have some sort of announcement about the death penalty, but not until after he signs the budget bill into law (which usually happens around late June).

However, when President Donald Trump was sworn back into office in January, he issued an executive order “restoring” the federal death penalty (which was halted by the Biden administration in 2021) and empowering the U.S. attorney general to “ensure that each state has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”

In response, Attorney General Dave Yost, a Columbus Republican, wrote Bondi last month asking for help with obtaining lethal-injection drugs.

Yost, who’s running for governor next year, wrote that pharmaceutical CEOs and their boards of directors should not be allowed to “subvert our country’s laws based on their moral scruples.” He’s also repeatedly railed against Ohio’s death-penalty purgatory, arguing it leads the state to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unnecessarily.

Yost, in a statement, said he didn’t seek the budget measure. But, he said, “It’s a commonsense approach and I fully support it.”

It remains to be seen whether this new death-penalty measure — one of hundreds of changes Ohio House Republicans made Tuesday to the massive budget bill – will end up in the final budget that DeWine signs into law.

A DeWine spokesman declined comment on the budget measure Wednesday.

JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, didn’t directly answer when asked what, if anything, the department has been doing recently to search for execution drugs, as well as whether state prisons officials have been working with federal officials to obtain such drugs.

“Our department does not currently possess any of the execution drugs listed in Ohio’s execution protocol,” Smith said in a one-sentence reply.

Jeremy Pelzer covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

An Ohio polygamist, her husband and her four lovers were thrown behind bars after they allegedly kidnapped and tortured a 26-year-old man held captive in a hotel room for a week – in a sick revenge scheme hatched by the group’s twisted matriarch.

Martina Jones, 28; her husband Michael Esqueda, 28; and boyfriends Aaron Bradshaw, 49; Austin Bradshaw, 28; David Cessna, 26; and Chance Johnston, 27, were arrested on March 22 for terrorizing the victim at a Red Roof Inn in Maumee, according to the Toledo Police Department, WTVG reported.

The deranged lovers, who reportedly share multiple children, brutally beat the victim with a metal baseball bat, forced him to stand for extended periods of time, and only allowed him to eat and drink once a day over the seven-day stretch, police said.

The victim, who was also viciously punched and kicked, only slept for a total of 10 hours while he was held against his will, charging documents alleged.

“He was being essentially tortured, assaulted, over the time frame of a week,” Maumee Chief of Police Josh Sprow told the outlet.

“His injuries were results of being struck with a baseball bat, struck with fists, elbows, stomping on him when he was on the ground – which over time resulted in multiple fractured bones.”

Sprow added that Jones ordered her deviant beaus to abduct the victim on March 14 and carry out the nightmarish scheme as retribution following a scuffle at her home, the outlet reported. 

The victim told police a dog fight erupted at the crazed woman’s home that resulted in her breaking her arm as the pair tried to stop the brawl. Jones, however, lied and told her unhinged companions that the man crippled her limb, police said. 

The tortured man was eventually rescued on March 21 when his captors let him venture to a Speedway convenience store, where he was able to speak with someone who then called his mother, according to police.

“When she was contacted by this literally a stranger – she knew something was up,” Sprow said, adding that the victim’s mother raced to the hotel room and freed her son, whose body was littered with injuries, the outlet reported. 

“It’s clearly a strange situation when you have multiple adult men involved in a relationship with a female and then this whole felonious assault, kidnapping taking place. Definitely not something that is normally happening in our city.”

The six suspects were each indicted Thursday for kidnapping, three counts of felonious assault and two counts of tampering with evidence, according to Fox8.

They are each being held on $200,000 bond.