Portland is stuck in this vicious cycle and I wanted to dig deeper
into the systemic intricacies behind the record-breaking toll of human life.
My name is Savannah Eadens. I'm a public safety reporter
for the Oregonian and Oregon Live. I've spent the better part of the past year reporting on
Portland's unprecedented gun violence. After a while I started to notice some trends. I began
to connect the dots between the few details we know about the circumstances of many of
the shootings and even what I could glean about a victim's life before the tragedy of their death.
on a chilly Monday morning in January I was sent to a homicide scene in the 8200 block of Northeast
Milton. After walking around and asking some questions I learned that the night before a man
named Aaron Williams, who had been experiencing homelessness and struggling with addiction,
was found shot to death on the property of a very dilapidated motel. I remember that a few
months earlier two cousins named Odion and David Turner were killed in a shooting that wounded four
others at the corner of Northeast Milton and 82nd Avenue. I had received some emails from
neighbors who lived nearby explaining to me that they believed that the motel called Madison Suites
was a source of the increasing violence but I tossed it to the side. I carried on
with the daily grind of breaking news and the onslaught of shootings that plagued Portland.
But then it happened again. At the end of march an Uber driver and a father of eight named Shawnee
Muhammad was found shot to death in the 8200 block of Northeast Milton. Four homicides in less than
eight months make this Portland's deadliest block and I realized this one street in an otherwise
seemingly quiet neighborhood represented this microcosm of so many of the problems
facing this city: gun violence, homelessness, drug dealing, addiction, mental health poverty,
property crime, sex trafficking. It just didn't seem to be on anyone's radar.
At first it seemed like everyone in this community was pointing their fingers at someone else,
but the problems were so much bigger and so much more complicated than that.
For years neighbors have been complaining to the city they had made many different efforts
to clean the neighborhood to find solutions but by 2022 there was a lot of apathy.
Many had moved away, others felt like giving up. I spent about three months hanging out in this area
interviewing dozens of neighbors, the motel owner, nearby businesses and organizations,
and several branches of the city's bureaucracies to answer one lingering question: why?
I met Ben Cutler a resident for a decade who started a community garden in the neighborhood.
He doesn't allow his 11-year-old daughter to walk down the street next to Madison Suites.
I feel like 82nd always been kind of rough and tumble and Madison Suites always catered
to that element. I mean there's a lot of good people here too. I've invested a lot of time and
effort in the community, to feel wrong to leave so we're just trying to double down and make it
better. but I also spoke with the owner of the motel. Mike Patel said he's been threatened tons
of times by patrons and campers but he stopped calling the police every time because it felt like
they were only responding to the shootings. They are put all the garbage, old needles
all using drugs and every time we told them to move out some of them people are very crazy,
some of them people are very dangerous i'm not safe neither. Nobody's safe here.
I met Gaura Allen who owns a home on northeast Milton. He said the shootings have become like
a background noise. It's interesting because for the longest time I think uh
everyone it was just like kind of accepted it, I guess this place is going to exist and it's just
going to continue being a vortex to pull people down. A few days before this story was published
Mayor Ted Wheeler sent one of his top advisors to meet Mike Patel the owner of Madison Suites
and offered the city's help. It's the beginning of what the mayor hopes is an intervention for
Northeast 82nd Avenue and Milton street. I'll be keeping tabs on how that plays out.