The chief deputy of the Belmont County Sheriff’s Office confirmed this week his department has continued working with state and federal investigators on the double homicide that took place in Belmont, Ohio on September 21, 2021.
Firefighters responded to a 911 call that morning along Trails End Road, and once the blaze was extinguished, the first responders discovered the couple deceased. The victims were identified as the owners of two Salsa Joe’s locations, and Belmont County Sheriff Dave Lucas announced the day after that Tom and Angela had been murdered.
“The first thing I want to make clear is that this is not a cold case in any way,” insisted Belmont County Chief James Zusack. “Chief Detective Ryan Allar is doing a superb job keeping the case very active by working it on a daily basis. It’s in no way a cold case because of the work that continues to be done on a weekly and daily basis. That’s how you have to do it because you just never know when a new piece of information may come our way. We have to be ready, and we are.
“A case becomes a cold case when you run out of options … when there are no more leads to look into and when the technology has taken as far as you can go. And we are absolutely not there yet with this case. This case is very much active, and we want the family to know that as well as the citizens of Belmont County,” the chief deputy continued. “We do receive the occasional phone call, and we look into to every single lead we receive. That’s how we will solve this.”
While Zusack refused to release many details in order to protect the ongoing investigation, he did confirm Allar and his detectives continue conversations with agents from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations and the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
“It’s a complicated case. That I can tell you. But I have total confidence in my detectives division, and I have complete confidence in the state and federal investigators they’ve been working with since this tragedy too place a little more than two years ago,” said Zusack, who is a Republican candidate to become the next sheriff of Belmont County. “Our investigators speak with the state and federal agencies at least weekly and probably more often than that. It’s all about putting the pieces together.
“We’ll take every opportunity we get to use resources that state and federal agencies have that we do not, and most often that involves something technological,” he explained. “This is an important case to solve so we’ll use all the help we can get from the state and federal investigators. Our detectives will work with those agencies for as long as it takes. I know they are just as determined as we are.”
A little more than a year ago, members of the Strussion family financed billboards in three communities – Bridgeport, Wheeling, and St. Clairsville – and offered a $20,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the murderer or murderers.
At the time, Lisa Balog, sister of victim Tom Strussion, told WTRF TV-7 reporter D.K. Wright the following:
“Look at my brother and sister-in-law’s face. People in the community have to have something that can help. Whether you think it’s nothing at all, it’s big to us. So please just take notice of them (the billboards), and if there’s any information you may have, reach out to the number that’s on the billboard and share it.”
Chief Deputy Zusack said the billboards instigated phone calls, and he’s hopeful additional media coverage will do the same.
“When the family put up those billboards, I know we received a lot of phone calls during the first month, and we followed every lead. I can’t comment if we discovered new information at that point, but the billboards did attract a lot of attention to the case, that’s for sure,” he said. “We want to keep this case on the minds of our residents in case something new comes to their mind that they haven’t told us yet.
“Maybe someone saw something. Maybe someone said something,” Zusack said. “In a case like this one, we really don’t know where our next piece of information could come from.”
