By Maxine Bernstein
The Oregonian
PORTLAND, Ore. - Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward is the first to acknowledge significant holes in his deputy’s investigation of the April 21 hunting accident near Fields that has sidelined Portland’s police chief and snared Portland’s mayor in the fallout.
“I think mistakes were made on the investigation, and that’s only going to be fixed through training and corrective action,” Ward said.
One of the county’s four deputies, Chris Nisbet, headed to Fields after a 911 call came in at 4:37 p.m. April 21 that a man had been shot in the back, dispatch records and his summary report show. Nisbet arrived at 6:01 p.m. and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officer John Megan joined him.
Megan interviewed the victim and Nisbet interviewed the six other men in the group.
There, Nisbet never identified which weapon discharged or seized any of the guns for further examination, according to his summary report. He made field observations that most in the group seemed drunk, but didn’t follow up with field sobriety tests.
“He’s 100 miles from backup,” Ward said of the deputy. “It turned out to be a case that more than one guy can handle. I think he did a really decent job for what he had. He did the best he could. If any mistakes were made, let them rest on my shoulders.”
The sheriff said he’d encourage his deputies to call for backup to help with a complex investigation. But it’s difficult, he said, with a five-member Sheriff’s Office covering one of the largest counties in the country at more than 10,000 square miles with only about 7,700 people.
Five state troopers also are based in Harney County, but getting their on-the-spot help to the remote southeastern edge of the county -- in this case Fields, 110 miles south of Burns -- is nearly impossible, Ward said.
“Without that assistance, it certainly opens the door for things to be missed or looked past,” the sheriff said.
Law enforcement and criminal justice experts said the deputy’s observations that four of the seven men had alcohol on their breath and had bloodshot, watery eyes would have provided sufficient probable cause to have each submit to a field sobriety test or a blood draw from paramedics at the scene.
No criminal statute expressly forbids the use of firearms while intoxicated, but evidence showing that someone was over the legal drinking limit and then shot a friend could help support a criminal charge of negligent wounding or reckless endangerment.
“If there’s evidence someone’s mental and physical faculties are impaired, that could bolster a charge of recklessness,” said Edward A. Kroll, president of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
Anyone who has the slightest amount of training in firearms is familiar with the National Rifle Association’s basic rules of gun safety, said criminal defense lawyer John Henry Hingson III. The rules include: Never use alcohol or drugs before or while shooting.
“You don’t need to be a graduate of the police academy to know it’s something you just don’t do,” said Hingson, an expert on the intoxicated driving law. “For the victim, this is a civil plaintiff lawyer’s dream case.”
Rick Hargrave, who administers the information and education division in the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, said the agency’s hunter program emphasizes “that anytime you’re handling weapons and you’re in the field, you need to be in total control and not under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”
The hunting accident occurred when Portland Police Chief Larry O’Dea was camping with two retired Portland police supervisors who had served with him on the bureau’s tactical Special Emergency Reaction Team and four other friends.
They were sitting in a line on lawn chairs, shooting ground squirrels while drinking beer, the deputy’s report said. O’Dea was on the left of his friend, Robert Dempsey, 54, who was shot.
During the interview, the deputy noted that O’Dea was shaking and had glassy and bloodshot eyes. O’Dea told the deputy that he believed his friend had shot himself accidentally while trying to put his pistol back in a shoulder holster and that O’Dea’s own rifle wasn’t in his hand at the time.
But O’Dea sometime later -- it’s not clear when -- called Dempsey and admitted to his friend that he had shot him when he picked up his rifle after grabbing a drink, the sheriff’s records show. Dempsey was sitting, turned away from O’Dea, and got shot in his lower left back.
O’Dea has never told the Harney County Sheriff’s Office that he was responsible, Ward said. The deputy learned of O’Dea’s role only from a May 14 phone interview with Dempsey.
O’Dea and Mayor Charlie Hales didn’t publicly acknowledge the shooting until last Friday, when reporters started asking questions. The mayor’s spokeswoman subsequently confirmed that O’Dea had told the mayor four days after the shooting that he had accidentally wounded his friend. But O’Dea faced no apparent repercussions.
Hales on Tuesday placed O’Dea on paid administrative leave, conceding turmoil in the Police Bureau in the aftermath of the disclosures.
“It’s incredibly derelict in the duty of the chief of police on his own private time to mix firearms and alcohol,” Hingson said. “What kind of example is he setting for the rank and file of the police department?”
O’Dea has applied for hunting licenses in Oregon since 1994 (buck/deer/cougar/black bear/elk/antelope) and applied for a new deer/buck hunting license via the internet on May 14, less than a month after he shot Dempsey.
Nisbet interviewed each of the men who were present but wasn’t able to find the campsite where the shooting occurred. It already had been cleared and packed up. O’Dea didn’t acknowledge he was a police officer and neither did the others with police connections, the records show.
The deputy didn’t pursue inconsistencies in some of the statements. Based on his report, it’s not clear if Dempsey had a shoulder holster on when shot. O’Dea told the deputy he removed the holster from Dempsey to check for his wound, while another in the group said Dempsey didn’t have a holster.
One man in the group, Steve Buchtel, who once supervised Portland police firearms training, first said the shooting appeared self-inflicted but then suggested the bullet “would have had to come from somewhere else,” the records show.
Ward said he needs to find a way to get his patrol deputies additional training on conducting interviews, doing field sobriety tests in such situations and calling for help.
“When you can identify areas you can do better, you can get training on those and work on them,” Ward said. “Some big agencies have experts for each of these areas. We have to learn to do it all. And learning through repetition helps.”
But Ward said he immediately asked Oregon State Police to investigate when he learned Portland’s police chief was involved and appeared to have misled his deputy. He’s also glad the deputy was wearing a body camera during the interviews.
“We all make mistakes, but what happened here shouldn’t take away from the mistakes that those involved here didn’t own up to,” the sheriff said.