By Lizzy Acker
The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Three witnesses to a fatal officer-involved shooting late Saturday night at a Southeast Portland homeless shelter say the man police killed had burst into the facility and was slashing and stabbing himself with a knife before he was killed by officers.
“It was horrific,” said Morgan Thomas Pickering of Portland during an interview Sunday morning across the street from the Cityteam Ministries shelter on Southeast Grand Avenue. Pickering was waiting in the rain across the street from the shelter to retrieve his belongings. “We were all scared for our lives.”
Police say the man who was shot was a suspect in an earlier carjacking. They did not release his name, pending an autopsy, but family identified him as John Elifritz, a Portland native who had addresses in Clackamas County. A cousin said Elfritz, 48, had struggled at times with methamphetamine use, but was trying to get his life back in order.
Pickering and the two other witnesses, both of whom declined to be identified and were checked into the facility at the time of the incident, all say the police were justified in shooting the man, who they say was acting erratically.
“The Portland Police Bureau values human life and accepts the authority to use lethal force with great reverence,” said Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw in a statement Sunday afternoon. The chief did visit the scene of the shooting Saturday night, a bureau spokesman said.
“I am aware a video was taken of this incident by a community member and that video was posted to the internet,” she added. “Please be reminded that deadly force investigations are extremely complex and take time. The Police Bureau is committed to transparency and will ensure the entire investigation is released in a timely manner that does not impact the integrity of the investigation.”
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A vigil for Elifritz was held on the street corner outside the Cityteam shelter Sunday afternoon. By 4:30 p.m., about 40 people had showed up, some holding signs that read, “More Mental Health Care, Not More Cops.” Friends had placed a framed photo of Elifritz at the site, which was surrounded by candles, flowers and a teddy bear by Sunday night.
Kirk Smith wasn’t part of the vigil, but he was among a small group of men standing outside the shelter doors. He said he was attending a meeting inside the shelter Saturday night when the shooting began.
“There were eight cops here and they could have took him down,” Smith said. “They used the bean bags and then they shot him. It didn’t make any sense. They could have tased him and took him down and went and got him help. He was begging for help. He wasn’t saying anything, but you could tell just from his actions.”
Carl Shellhammer was also inside the shelter that night. He said police first shot the man with “bean bag, plastic, knock-down bullets and he just kept getting back up.”
"(The police) were doing it in the best way that they could without hurting any of the other people in the building,” he said.
Sunday evening, the ACLU of Oregon released a statement from Executive Director David Rogers on the shooting.
“Was there any attempt to de-escalate the situation before officers open fire inside the homeless shelter full of innocent bystanders? If not, why not?” the statement read. “We join many in the community by calling for a prompt, thorough, and transparent investigation into this shooting. The public deserves to get a detailed account of why this man was shot and what actions Portland Police took to avoid yet another fatal shooting.”
The ACLU called on Portland officers to use body-worn cameras as a means to “increase transparency, promote police accountability, and help ensure interactions with community members are fair and lawful.”
Officers responded at 7:30 p.m. to a report of a crashed vehicle at Southeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Stark Street, according to police. When they arrived, the driver had fled.
Officers learned the car, a silver Honda CRV, had been stolen in a carjacking earlier in the day, Sgt. Chris Burley, a Portland Police Bureau spokesman, told The Oregonian/OregonLive Saturday night.
A short time later, a clerk at Jackson’s Gas Station, at the corner of Southeast Grand and Washington Street, called 911 to report a man with a knife, talking about suicide and murder inside the station’s convenience store.
Police responding they learned there was a man outside Cityteam Ministries Portland Shelter, a long-term and emergency homeless shelter, holding a knife to his throat. Officers responding located the suspect inside. By then, dispatchers were instructed to call for an ambulance, as there were reports the suspect was bleeding heavily from his neck.
Cityteam Portland Executive Director Mike Giering on Saturday said an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting had just begun at the time of the shooting. The witnesses said the meeting was in progress when the suspect came through the door, shirtless.
One witness said a shelter employee gave the man a jacket. Shortly after, police arrived.
Pickering, who filmed part of the incident on his phone, said the man had a knife and was “stabbing himself in the neck.”
Pickering and two others described the man as erratic and shouting, slashing and stabbing himself with a knife. They said police fired either rubber bullets or bean bags, but they didn’t subdue the man, who then lunged at officers with the knife in his hand.
At that point, the witnesses said, officers shot him.
“Three, four, five shots,” Pickering said. “He just dropped.”
Medical responders determined the man was dead at the scene, police said.
Pickering called officers’ action “absolutely 100 percent justified,” adding, “Cops did everything right.”
“I applaud their actions,” he said. “They actually saved lives.”
The two other witnesses echoed Pickering, calling the chaotic scene terrifying.
The men said buses took most of the between 30 and 40 people at the shelter to another location. Those who remained spent a cold night in the rain, waiting for their belongings to be released from the shelter Sunday morning.
Investigators will work to determine if the suspect armed with the knife posed an immediate threat to others in the shelter, officers or himself when police used deadly force against him.
Sunday evening, Mayor Ted Wheeler released a statement on the shooting.
“Last night officers responded to multiple calls for service regarding a suspect that ultimately ended in an officer involved shooting,” the statement read. “The loss of a life is always tragic. My priority is to discover the facts and circumstances regarding this incident. Already, there are those who want to immediately define what happened. It would be highly irresponsible for me to participate in speculation at this time. I urge us all to allow investigators to do their work, to uncover the facts, and to report on their findings.”
In 2016, consultants hired by the city of Portland were critical of a longstanding Portland police training tenet, commonly referred to by officers as the “21-foot rule’’ – the idea that someone with a knife who is within 21 feet of them can attack faster than an officer has time to pull, aim and fire a gun.
“The 21-foot rule should never be seen as a green light to use deadly force or as creating a ‘kill zone,’'' experts have found, yet that lore seems to remain “inculcated’’ in the Portland Police Bureau, the California-based OIR Group wrote in a report in 2016 on Portland officer-involved shootings and deaths in police custody.
The consultants then urged the bureau to clarify training on the 21-foot rule so it’s not used to justify a police shooting when a suspect armed with a knife comes within 21 feet of an officer. It’s unclear if that training was ever altered.
The rule’s origin? More than 25 years ago, a Salt Lake City police officer performed rudimentary tests and concluded an armed attacker who bolted at a cop could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their gun. The conclusion was repeated in training videos. But in May 2015, police chiefs attending the Police Executive Research Forum conference expressed concern that some officers consider the 21-foot rule a legal justification to shoot someone, instead of seeing it as a general warning for officers to protect themselves when they encounter a person with a knife, the report said.
Portland police have not said how many officers fired their weapons nor released the identities of the officers involved. The officers have been placed on paid administrative leave until the investigation and a grand jury hearing have concluded, protocol for the bureau.
Elliot Njus, Samantha Swindler and Maxine Bernstein contributed to this report.
©2018 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)