Kirk Barton, a former Ohio State offensive lineman and Buckeye Scoop owner, was sentenced Wednesday to 5 to 7.5 years in a Franklin County court after pleading guilty to one count of aggravated vehicular homicide in the June 2025 crash that killed 24-year-old Ethan Perry of Columbus.
A second aggravated vehicular homicide count and two counts of driving while impaired were dropped as part of the plea.
When the crash happened last year, around 3 a.m. on June 21, Barton was driving his Ford F-150 Raptor the wrong way on U.S. Route 33 before turning around and heading eastbound toward Historic Dublin at excessive speed. He struck Perry’s 2012 Lexus IS 250 near Franklin and West Bridge streets — just west of the Bridge Park area, one of Dublin’s busiest and most visible stretches — and his truck didn’t come to rest until roughly 900 feet from the point of impact. Perry, 24, of Columbus, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Barton, who suffered non-life-threatening injuries, was treated at Riverside Methodist Hospital before being taken into police custody. Officers who responded noted that he had glassy, bloodshot eyes and slurred speech, could not answer basic questions, and later admitted to drinking before the crash. An Instagram post from the Buckeye Scoop account in the hours before the crash had shown Barton out that evening, and a representative for Buckeye Scoop told Awful Announcing at the time, “We are praying for the kid’s family and all involved.”
Barton played offensive line at Ohio State from 2003-07, earning first-team All-American honors before the Chicago Bears drafted him in the seventh round of the 2007 NFL Draft. His professional career never amounted to much, and he eventually found his lane in the Ohio State media ecosystem through Buckeye Scoop, a football website and message board that kept him in the Buckeyes’ orbit long after his playing career ended, making him a recognizable name in the Columbus sports media world.
That connection to Ohio State had been severed years before the crash. In 2022, Ohio State banned Barton and revoked his media credentials after finding he had used “improper and unauthorized access to Ohio State’s internal football video system” to expose team formations, schemes, and personnel changes on Buckeye Scoop. He had been credentialed as a reporter by a local TV station before that credential was revoked, and was subsequently escorted out of a team scrimmage, even though former players traditionally retain access to those events. The ban came amid a broader legal dispute over the ownership of Buckeye Scoop itself, in which other site owners had fired and sued Barton over ethical concerns involving the site’s finances.
Long before any of that, Barton had made headlines in 2018 when bodycam footage of him being tased while intoxicated at the Memorial Golf Tournament went viral, and court records showed a pattern of traffic-related offenses that stretched back years, which included an OVI from 2010 that was dismissed, and a 2017 OVI that was pleaded down to reckless operation, a charge that came with a fine and a 180-day license suspension.
Ethan Perry was 24 years old.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.