One hundred and forty feet up, atop the dome of Oregon’s State Capitol building, stands a gilded man carrying an axe. A gleaming pioneer painted in flakes of 23-karat gold, people call him “Gold Man.”

In years past, as statues across Oregon were pulled down — from a racist newspaper publisher, to more than one white pioneer, to many a US president — Gold Man has remained, unreachable. He presides over a state built after the murderous removal of Indigenous people from their lands, presumably by the sort of men that Gold Man is meant to embody. He is a perfect representative: to be Oregonian can mean pride or shame, or rationalization, or even turning your back to the hard history of this place.

One bright afternoon last February, just over Gold Man’s shoulder inside a Willamette University building across the street from the Capitol, professor Seth Cotlar and his students were looking straight at a different hard history.

Cotlar dimmed the lights.

“I thought maybe we would take just a couple minutes to watch George Wallace,” he said, hitting play. Black and white footage rolled: a 1964 speech by the segregationist governor of Alabama and three-time presidential candidate.

In a southern drawl, Wallace plainly told a crowd at Ball State University that the recently-passed Civil Rights Act was, in his estimation, a ploy by the federal government to meddle in how states ran schools. He painted a portrait of a country in disarray, where prayer was being banned from classrooms.

Cotlar paused the video. What did the students think?

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This is History 221, The Far Right in America: 1920-2020. For a semester, students immersed themselves in an examination of America’s most ultraconservative political groups and figures, from the Ku Klux Klan, to the John Birch Society, to neo-Nazis, to the far-right creations of the modern political moment, like the Patriot movement and the embrace of Christian nationalism.

“Some things that stood out to me was just how much I could kind of hear Trump in it,” a junior named Ava said of Wallace’s speech. “Where he’s like, ‘you know what we’re not allowed to even do anymore? We’re not allowed to pray in school.’”

“Who might be behind taking Christian prayers out of schools, do you think?” Cotlar asked.

“The communists, of course,” an 18-year-old student named Katie said.

There were chuckles.

“The Jews,” Ava offered; Cotlar’s students were, by that point, overly familiar with the ways antisemitism has been a constant, catalyzing point among the far-right.

Cotlar pushed his students: Wallace never explicitly named communists or Jews as the reason prayers weren’t being said in school. Why were they going there?

Because of who Wallace sounded like. “The growth of centralized control over every aspect of life gives Kenneth Goff,” Katie read from her notes — miraculously combining the slang of a modern teenager with a reference to an obscure minister of Christian Identity — an ideology that preaches Jewish people are the spawn of Eve and Satan.

Libi, a 19-year-old, chimed in. “There’s an interesting ebb and flow where you see the Asa Carter come out,” she said, nodding to the violent Ku Klux Klan leader who was Wallace’s speechwriter.1 “Like, ‘I don’t want to appear too crazy, but I’ll put the idea out there.’”

“Right, yeah,” Cotlar said. “‘I support the federal government. But they want to control every little aspect of your life.’”

In an interview, Cotlar said the point of teaching a class on the history of the far-right in America is not to explain modern politics or President Trump. He came up with the idea for the class while giving a course on the history of conservatism.

“The Tea Party stuff was just starting up,” he said. One day in class, a student raised his hand. “His question was like, ‘why are these people so stupid?’”

Cotlar was surprised — put off by the student’s anti-democratic tone. “Do you want to understand them or do you just want to feel superior to them?” he remembered thinking. It felt like an attitudinal shift from how his generation thought about people with different politics than their own. He figured if students knew more about history, the Tea Party’s emergence would make sense.

In explaining America’s far right past, Cotlar found his students more and more often drawing connections to the present. “The resonances are so obvious,” he said. “The idea is that history does help us understand our present moment, but it can only help us understand it if we take it on its own terms. So if you’re just using history to score points in the present, you’re not actually doing history. You’re just selectively using history to talk about the present. … It’s not education.”

The class has led Cotlar to notice stark differences in how he and his students view this history.

Cotlar is in his 50s, and for most Gen-Xer’s lives, people like George Wallace were considered fringe, “a product of this past — this racist or bigoted past,” he said. They were a part of the political landscape Americans shrugged off, a fringe with ideas that might die off with the people who held them.

“That was a source of comfort and it turns out it was false comfort,” Cotlar said. “For this generation of students, that way of making sense of it just doesn’t land with them at all.”

It doesn’t land because the only politics they’ve witnessed have been dominated by Trump, the first president they can recall.

Over the course of the semester, I spoke to several of Cotlar’s students about coming of age in a world where extreme politics are a normalized, constant presence. I wanted them to speak to me honestly and candidly, and so each is referred to by either their first name, or a pseudonym. None remember Trump as a man in trashy tabloids or through a cameo in Home Alone 2. For as long as they can remember, he has been an untouchable golden man who spouts racism and conspiracy theories, and who sets the tone of all political discourse in America.

What is that like? To grow up in a world dominated and shaped by far-right politics and not know any different? What does that do to your perception of the country you live in, and your concept of the future?

How does it feel to learn that Americans long turned their backs on the far-right, thinking it would simply go away?

Ava heard Donald Trump’s name for the first time on YouTube. She was 10, watching a video on the game Minecraft, which appeals to young gamers and involves mining for building materials.

The video asked: What if Donald Trump was a Minecraft player? A blocky, pixelated cartoon Trump in a suit and red tie created a wall snaking across a green landscape. He “built a wall to keep out the monsters,” Ava recalled. “I remember going to my dad and being like, ‘In this video, he built a wall!’ And my dad’s like, ‘No, he actually wants to do that.’”

The presidential election trickled into Ava’s sixth grade classroom, where kids squabbled over the candidates: Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “One girl was like, ‘Trump is great, he wants to keep immigrants out.’ And she’s 11,” Ava remembered. Teachers instructed the grade schoolers to stop asking each other who they would vote for if they could.

Ava described Trump as a looming presence throughout her life. When the Access Hollywood tape made headlines, in which Trump said he could grab women “by the pussy,” she was 11. “It was outside my realm of understanding but I knew he wasn’t good,” she said.

She has a vague memory of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where torch-wielding white men chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Ava was 12 when it happened. Her father is Jewish; she celebrates Hanukkah and Christmas.

“I was very angry because of how stupid everyone was. Because I’m Jewish — I’m ethnically Jewish. But they’re like, ‘Jews will not replace us,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? That’s not a thing.’”

Nine years later, she is acutely aware that antisemitism is very much a thing.

Ava is 21 now, majoring in art at Willamette. She wears glasses, pastels, jeans embroidered with flowers. One day, we sat on a couch on campus, and she showed me the messages she’s received on Instagram for having a Star of David on her profile.2

As Israel has waged a genocidal assault on Palestinians, strangers sent her direct messages calling her a Zionist. “I can be Jewish without wanting Palestinians to be killed,” she said. “Like, I don’t fuck with Israel. That’s not my place, man. And they — no matter what I said — kept hammering it in.”

Instead of just blocking them, she asked her dad to help her write a response. “It’s easy to blame Jews or whoever else for your problems, but ultimately it’s you,” she replied to her trolls. “You are the cause of your own failures and deflecting blame for your sad little life only keeps you stuck in hatred and hopelessness.”

Eventually, she had to block them anyway.

Taking the brunt of hate online is part of the reason Ava signed up for Cotlar’s class. “If I get the chance to learn about people who think, for instance, that fluoride was a Jewish plot to mind control people, I’m going to learn about that,” she said.

In class, she can detach herself from reality — read, discuss, study the ways the country cast the far-right as an inconsequential fringe. But when she isn’t in class, she can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the ways this brand of politics seems to be dictating her future. Optimism feels impossible.

“It’s just a mess and it’s just numbing after a while,” she told me one day in an email. “It becomes more and more taxing to believe in a livable future. When I imagine my adulthood, I don’t see anything worthwhile.”

When I asked what it was like to grow up in a world where extremism is the norm, several of Cotlar’s students brought up school shootings.3 Most began shooting drills in grade school. The killing of American children has been a steady rhythm throughout their lives, a massacre meted out several bodies at a time.

“I’m just very used to gun violence and mass shootings against marginalized communities and children,” Salem, a senior from Colorado, told me. “I’ve been a public school student in America.”

“There has not been a year in my life that there has not been a major school shooting,” said Emma, a 20-year-old from Idaho.

One of Emma’s earliest memories of school shootings was in the fourth grade, when her teacher explained how a shooting drill would go. Her teacher — whose own children were enrolled in the elementary school — said once the door to the classroom was locked, it shouldn’t be opened until police said it was safe.

What if their teacher’s children came to the classroom door, Emma recalled a fellow student asking — could she open it then?

“She told us that she couldn’t open the door because it could be the shooters using her daughter as a tactic to get to us,” Emma recalled.

“How did you process that?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I have yet.”

Cotlar said that over time, he’s seen his students change — that when he first started teaching at Willamette University, they were “so apolitical, it’s not even funny.” But just as often as school shootings came up in my interviews, so did political activism. Emma told me she has “walked hundreds of miles” during protests as a student: over school shootings, climate change, LGBTQ rights.

“I love going to protests so much,” Salem said. The signs, the community, the chants, the songs. He’s been going to protests since he was a kid, and loads up a backpack filled with water and snacks anytime he attends one. When we spoke, he was adding a lawyer’s contact information to his protest kit.

Salem recalled one demonstration at a church in Colorado that was public about being welcoming to the queer community. “The Westboro Baptist Church did not like that. So they came out to protest,” he said, referring to the anti-LGBTQ religious group. Salem held an umbrella with The Parasol Patrol, which “line the sidewalks and just create a barrier between the people who are going into the church and the Westboro Baptist Church,” he said.

“Making people aware that we’re here and we’re not going to just hide because they don’t like us … is really important to me,” he said.

Some of Cotlar’s students expressed guilt for protests they hadn’t attended, or anytime they tuned out the news. One said he wished he had been less engaged in his studies in high school and more politically active. Several spoke about ambitions to run for political office in their home states.

“Kids in my generation were very politicized,” said Sela, an 18-year-old who grew up in Utah. “We would have debates at the lunch table in third, fourth grade.” Kids called her “libtard.” She didn’t care: “I dug my heels in.”

In school, friendships formed along political lines.

“I don’t think I would ever be in a deep, close relationship with someone who is MAGA,” Libi told me.

But drawing those lines around differences in belief became more complicated when it came to family. Maddie, 21, grew up in Alaska in a family she describes as on the “Trump train.”

“My cousin was like, ‘You’re kind of the liberal of the family,’” she said. “That makes sense. I do go to a small, liberal school in the Pacific Northwest. I do think that people should have basic human rights and the government should be helping them with that. And I don’t like Trump.”

In 2023, she debated with her father over a drag queen story hour planned during Pride Month at her local public library. “I was like, ‘If you’re opposed to a drag queen storytime, just don’t go plain and simple,’” she recalled. “And he was like, ‘But they’re doing it in a public space. And I don’t like that.’ And I got very heated with him about it.”

Katie — a freshman — grew up in a conservative town in California. She is half-Korean, dyes her hair dark blue. As a child, her father was involved in the local Elks Lodge, and by extension, so was she. The people there were like family. As she’s gotten older, she’s come to realize most voted for Trump.

“The care they have for me, as a minority and a woman and someone with dyed hair — like I’m very obviously on the more liberal side of things.”

But she finds that care for her “disconnected from what politics they’re voting for.”

That confusion is a point of struggle: Why would people who love her actively advance policies that would negatively affect her?

In my conversations with Cotlar’s students, it was clear they were seeing political extremism as simultaneously all around them and as a phenomenon separate from themselves: a topic that could be studied and read about, and that, in some cases, might help them understand their own family.

But for one student, the class material was not a curiosity.

Watching the people in black and white footage spouting racist, antisemitic views was like looking in a mirror, reminding him of a past version of himself.

****

Tommy was 15-years-old when he first encountered mass violence.

It was March 2019. He and a friend were browsing posts on 4Chan — an online cathedral to shitposting and real-life violence — when he clicked a video. It was footage recorded by a white supremacist mass shooter as he murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“We’re just watching it over and over again,” Tommy said. “I can’t explain it, but we were just infatuated by this video.”

“I was so desensitized to it,” he said. “If I think about it now, it’s revolting.”

When we spoke, Tommy was 22. In a coffee shop a few blocks from Willamette’s campus, he set aside an 832-page book on Che Guevara when I sat down. He strained to find words to describe what appealed to him about watching such graphic, real-life violence.

He struggled as a kid, constantly transferring schools over behavioral issues. He screamed at his liberal parents, made enemies at school. On 4Chan, he found a world he described as “countercultural,” and that “totally played into my anti-authority thing,” he said.

Something about that shooting video grabbed him and took hold, leading him down a rabbit hole toward more mass shooters. He scrutinized their manifestos, brimming with hate and calls for violence. At school, Tommy started wearing a trench coat — his nod to the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.4 He absorbed the Christchurch shooter’s belief in the Great Replacement Theory — a conspiracy theory that white people are intentionally being replaced by non-white populations.

Tommy hesitated when I asked if he thought about committing a mass shooting. He shook his head, looked away: “Not seriously.” That video was the beginning of what he calls his “Nazi journey.”

He and his friend had an idea to start a Nazi club, designing a logo and letterhead, but gave up after another kid called it stupid. Nonetheless, Tommy became “the Nazi kid” at his high school. On Zoom calls during COVID, his room was decorated with a Reichskriegsflagge — the Imperial German flag flown by Nazis — on the wall behind him, and a replica AK-47. His fellow students hated him; he knew that. His teachers couldn’t stand him.

“I think I also really enjoyed the idea that people were a little scared. You know what I mean?” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, what’s he going to do?’ I think it sort of gave me this perceived sense of like, not really authority…it was like bigger than I was.”

As I’ve reported on extremism, I’ve come to think the world we live in has two distinct dimensions. There is the world where we breathe air and walk on solid ground, sleep in a soft bed, consume food and water to stay alive. It is the world of interaction and social cues and the collisions of 8 billion people as they move about the planet. There is much extremism in this part of our world, and that’s where I report. Or try to. I speak to people in person, show up to rallies, look other humans in the eye.

And then there is the digital world: the dimension where so many people, including me, spend our days working, the world where we talk to friends (real, imagined), where we fill our brains with information (factual, dubious), where we create new versions of ourselves (accurate, distorted) and form opinions of others. Here, we Zoom into meetings and classrooms and court hearings and book clubs to interact with people, but never feel the warmth of human skin. It is an aromaless world meant to sell us things, where we sell ourselves, where all information must be sold and made appealing enough for a click.

In the digital world, extremism moves like wildfire across a dry forest floor. Any idea can make someone money. That’s even the case on this very website, where an extremist pushing violent male supremacist views is classified as “news.”

I push that digital world away as much as I can. I read paper books, stay logged off social media websites as much as I can, physically lock my phone in a box with a timer for hours on end. I do it to insulate myself, but I realize now that inclination is, in a sense, a remnant of my own youth, my own past where the world wasn’t so loud in my ears all the time. Young people haven’t had the mental luxury to know these worlds as separate.

In their lives, those worlds have merged, blended. Political rhetoric that simmers online, divorced of all empathy and civility, flows offline. Horrific real-life violence has always been available to them: a Google search away, a reality they’ve been preparing for since grade school.

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At the end of each of my interviews with Cotlar’s students, I told them to email me if they wanted to talk about anything else. One afternoon, I got an email from Katie. She was still thinking about our conversation.

“When we were speaking I realized your definition was different from mine,” she wrote. “For you (please correct me if I’m wrong), extremism is rhetoric. A line that someone like Trump crossed a long time ago. But to me, extremism is violence.”

“I wake up in the morning and am greeted with death. This politician was shot. This building was bombed,” she wrote. “This school had a mass shooter. So much so, that state sanctioned violence is barely a separate category. ICE strangled a man to death, and a car was driven into a synagogue and the United States is the aggressor in another war. On and on and on, my world is nothing but violence.”

An administration fueled by extremism has promised violence against everyone she loves. How can she stop thinking about that?

“I wake up, I go to class, and I pretend everything is fine,” she said. “Apathy is better, I don’t know a more peaceful world, so in this one I will keep marching forward.”

Katie echoed the nihilism I’d heard from Ava: that it’s hard to picture a hopeful future because neither has ever known a hopeful present.

“Everything is so broken. There are no jobs, and there are no houses, and the economy and climate change. And now what was once the looming threat of war is just war,” she wrote. “We think wistfully of a permanence we will never have. To dream of the future, is to believe that you have one.”

Emma — who said she still hadn’t processed the trauma of school shooting drills from grade school — heard about better times from her parents. They tell her stories about growing up in the 1990s, about a carefree adolescence.

“I get very wistful in a way,” she said. “I’m nostalgic for a period I was never a part of.”

Their nihilism didn’t seem entirely unearned. Cotlar didn’t think so either. He pointed to the cost of living in the West, how jobs that might have otherwise gone to new graduates are being replaced by artificial intelligence. “The world they’re entering into is super dark,” he said. “It takes a degree of incredible imagination and will to imagine a better world. That takes a lot of work, given their historical framework, given their frame of reference.”

After the Zoom incident, Tommy lost access to his laptop and phone. Other students at his high school “hated me for who I was.” Tommy became acutely aware that he was on the verge of expulsion again, and had to apologize to everyone for the Nazi flag and fake gun.

Tommy retreated into reading. He has always enjoyed a big, daunting book. His favorite is Dune.5 One day, he sat down with a book at a table of students he didn’t know, and they started talking.

“We immediately hit it off. And we were just telling jokes, having a great time,” he said. During one class, they were tasked with planting trees on the school grounds. “Basically, every afternoon for a month we would just sort of go out on our own and just dig and sort of shoot the shit.”

Everyone knew Tommy was the Nazi kid, but those students never really brought it up, didn’t dwell on why he was the Nazi kid.

“I had never really experienced a social life like this before where I was doing school, where I was going to prom,” he said. “They sort of taught me how to be a regular person again.”

He got involved with the theater program, led by a Black, queer teacher. “I totally think that he saw something in me, and was like, ‘OK, let me see if I can work on this kid.’” Tommy was hired as a stage manager for a production of Romeo & Juliet, and threw himself into the job.

For the first time he could recall, he wasn’t being ostracized. He had given people every reason to push him away, but people only seemed to pull him closer.

Eventually, after enough time, he just stopped being the Nazi kid.

I asked if he could pinpoint something that changed in him; he said that’s what he’s been trying to figure out. He thinks that as he got closer to other people, he “developed a ton of empathy.”

“I think one of the biggest changes in my life is how emotional I get over things that are happening to other people,” he said. “I think I probably just grew up.”

Tommy said talking about that time in his life brings him a lot of shame; this isn’t something people know about him. Every now and then, he’ll be looking for something in his Google Drive and find some remnant of that time of his life, like the logo for the Nazi club. “When I come across them, it’s like ‘oh Jesus Christ,’” he said. He deletes the files as he finds them.

At the end of the school year, I checked in with Tommy to see how Cotlar’s class went for him. He said he noticed throughout the semester the other students seemed to hear the material differently than he did, and would immediately disregard the far-right figures they were studying.

“I’ve sort of been surprised at the level of instant disgust and disagreement with the figures that we talk about,” Tommy said. “It’s like this immediate, ‘Oh fuck this person, I hate this person.’”

He finds himself too often being willing to see political questions from any side — someone who is naive at a time when political figures are growing better at manipulating audiences.

“I’ll apply this logic to illogical racism and illogical bigotry,” he said. “Initially upon hearing it, I’ll sort of like analyze it instead of just being like, ‘oh my God, I can’t believe it.’”

It’s something he wants to change about himself. To not just give everyone the benefit of the doubt, to not always see their side. “I fall into traps really easily,” he said.

While so much of Cotlar’s course was about the ideologies that long infused US politics, his students seemed to be taking away that Americans fell into a trap when they turned a blind eye to the fringe.

“Professor Cotlar often brings up this point,” Emma said, “that violence in America has always existed since the violence of our colonization of the land, to the violence of every major political movement that’s happened.”

She told me about the 1856 beating of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist member of the Senate. After giving a speech criticizing slave owners, a pro-slavery member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina entered the Senate chamber and, incensed over his remarks, nearly beat Sumner to death with his cane. It is credited as a pivotal moment in the lead up to The Civil War.

“The violence of reconstruction, the violence of the great migration of people of color from the South to the North,” she said. “There is constant violence of a mostly political nature that’s happening in American history that we always kind of forget about and put a more palatable lens over, which then becomes the idea of the United States.”

As Emma told me this story — one I’d never heard before — I started to wonder who is actually innocent in America? The young people who have grown up thinking there is no hope in a better future? Or the rest of us? The adults who fooled ourselves into thinking that our nation’s violent moments were some exception, and not the golden rule of this place.

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Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Sen. Charles Sumner's title.

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In many cases, residents of Idaho, Oregon and Washington have debated what role local police should play in helping, or hindering, these federal immigration officers. This past month, a fascinating debate played out in Idaho’s deep red legislature that saw local law enforcement pushing back against the White House’s grandest deportation dreams.

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This week, we got word that a 46-year-old man working at a Portland area Amazon warehouse died on the job and immediately tracked down insiders who could help the public understand what happened. Employees told The Western Edge they were instructed to keep working as the man lay unresponsive on the ground. One employee said they were discouraged from assisting in life-saving efforts.

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Editor’s Note: This story was updated Tuesday, April 14, 2026 with additional statements from Amazon.

Sam was helping unload trucks when a heavy thud against concrete echoed across the Amazon warehouse. An employee’s lifeless body lay on the floor.

Work halted in the loading docks on the south side of Amazon’s distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon. Sam and other employees stared at the person who’d collapsed just 20 feet away. Conveyor belts of packages continued to roll.

“I didn’t have a direct line of sight of the person’s face, but I saw a body form laying lifeless,” Sam told The Western Edge. Employees who spoke for this story requested anonymity to protect their jobs and their names have been changed.

Hours before, a group of trainees on their second day at Amazon sat in a breakroom scrolling Kindles loaded with training materials about what is required of Amazon workers in order to expeditiously shuttle goods to people’s homes across the Portland metro area. They learned how to safely lift packages while meeting the blistering pace the giant retailer expected. There were no training videos for what to do when a coworker dies right in front of you.

The man who collapsed on the floor died Monday, April 6 on the second level of the Amazon warehouse as machinery filled the cavernous loading dock with a dull hum.

In 911 calls, obtained through a public records request, one employee called for an ambulance at 1:55 pm. The dispatcher coached a confused employee over speakerphone on how to use a defibrillator.

Meanwhile, during a second call, another employee described a horrific scene: “We have an associate here who I believe is probably dead.”

“This person does have extensive blood coming from their head,” he said. “They are very blue looking.”

For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt. A week later, several workers said they still do not know what caused the man to die. Amazon said in a statement Tuesday that the man died from a “pre-existing medical condition.” Records indicate he was 46 years old.

Within moments of the man hitting the floor, Sam said a woman ran over and began performing chest compressions. The woman began to cry and screamed out for someone to help her.

Sam, who has CPR training, asked her supervisor if she could assist. The supervisor watched the woman heaving her weight into the man’s chest and gave no response.

“I start sobbing and said, ‘I want to help, please!’ I know she’s going to get tired and need to be subbed out,” Sam told The Western Edge.

The supervisor, who Sam perceived to be in shock, had a simple reply: “It has to be management or safety team. Please get back to work.”

“I need to help,” Sam said.

“Just turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work,” Sam recalled the manager saying.

As Sam stood in disbelief watching the woman give chest compressions, the supervisor softly nudged Sam, tears in the manager’s eyes now, too.

“Please,” the supervisor said, encouraging Sam to keep sorting packages. Eventually, paramedics showed up and the section of the warehouse where the man lay was closed off.

The death, reported for the first time by The Western Edge, has left employees at the facility in shock and concerned about their own safety. Several workers said they found their bosses’ response too callous; they seemed more concerned with keeping packages moving than with an employee dying in front of them.

“I’ve struggled to sleep,” Sam said. “I have a lot of anxiety over walking back into that building.”

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Workplace accidents and injuries are not new at the Amazon warehouse in Troutdale.

A 2019 investigation by Reveal found the Portland area facility had the worst injury rate out of 23 major distribution centers analyzed using data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In 2018, more than a quarter of all workers at the building - known as PDX9 - had some type of injury on the job. In a statement, Amazon said it has worked to decrease its injury rates since the 2019 report.

Deaths at Amazon facilities have also drawn media attention in recent years in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado. In 2024, OSHA concluded that a series of three deaths in New Jersey in the span of a month were not Amazon’s fault, prompting a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor. When that lawsuit settled in late 2025, it did not find Amazon at fault, and was fully dismissed in February 2026, according to federal court records.

RJ, another worker at the Troutdale facility who spoke to The Western Edge on condition of anonymity, said they often find managers to be unresponsive to employee complaints. RJ described the massive warehouse as a dirty building that regularly sees roaches, gnats and moths unaddressed.

Public records show OSHA has received at least two complaints in the past five years about heat in the Troutdale building. RJ said the fulfillment center has become warmer inside recently after Amazon installed “sound curtains,” which are designed to dampen the constant noise from machinery. They also prevent airflow, making the building warmer, according to RJ. They said managers had promised to install more fans by the end of May.

“I haven’t noticed a difference in noise level since they started the project,” RJ said. “I think it’s more for the people who work in the offices.”

In a statement Tuesday, Amazon called RJ’s allegations about the sound curtains “false.”

“Since these curtains were installed in February, the average temperature of the building has decreased,” the company said in an email.

According to multiple employees, the man who died was working on April 6 as a “tote runner” — a physically-demanding job that involves gathering stacks of yellow plastic bins as tall as a person, loading them onto a cart and hauling them up and down the long corridors of the warehouse for delivery to other workers, who will fill them with the goods that go onto trucks. Sometimes tote runners also act as “water spiders,” an in-house term for a worker who moves filled bins onto conveyor belts that move the goods to other parts of the warehouse for processing.

@daniellemarie448#fyp #viral #totes #toterunner #foryoupage #trained #warehouseworker #warehouse #working #worker #type1diabetic #blackwomen #blackgirlmagic #mom

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RJ said the Troutdale facility has recently reduced how many tote runners it employs, which means the few people in those positions work harder and stay in the roles longer than they have in the past.

RJ was not near their coworker when he died, but they were at work on April 6. They continued to work until the end of their 3:45 pm break, when supervisors on shift told all employees to clock out and go home, and that they would be paid for the rest of the shift. The supervisors at that point did not tell all the employees someone had died on the warehouse floor. RJ noticed people lingering in the building until 4 pm, roughly two hours after the man collapsed, according to multiple workers.

“Truthfully, I now have even less respect for our leadership team than I did before, which I didn’t know was possible,” RJ said. “It makes me feel more ashamed to work there knowing that people can drop dead and we have to carry on knowing it doesn’t matter to the higher ups, and everyone is replaceable.”

Amazon responded to a series of questions from The Western Edge with a written statement Monday.

"We're deeply saddened by the passing of a member of our team, and our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with their loved ones during this difficult time. We’ve been in touch with his family and have provided resources to support them,” a spokesperson said in an email. “For employees at our PDX9 facility, we’ve provided onsite grief counselors and additional support.”

The company said it closed its operations for the day on April 6 “shortly after EMS arrived,” but did not offer further specifics. The company acknowledged in its follow-up statement Tuesday that work did continue in the building after 911 had been called.

“Our team focused on ensuring our employee received the care he needed, protecting his privacy, and ensuring the safety of everyone onsite instead of distracting from those efforts by focusing on immediately evacuating other areas of the building in those early moments,” a company spokesperson said in an email.1

Sam arrived home on the afternoon of April 6 and tried to shake off what they had seen at the warehouse. A few hours later, Sam received a text message from management at Amazon: Employees should report to work as usual the next day. Business would continue.

Sam felt angry, and so did their colleagues. Workers began flooding the “My Voice” section of the Amazon employee app, asking managers to explain why they had kept people in the dark throughout the afternoon.

“I was uncontrollably shaking,” one person said in messages from the app that were provided to The Western Edge. “It wasn’t until second break came that we were finally allowed to stop work and go to the break room. That ain’t right.”

“Amazon was given a 16 billion dollar tax cut to invest in AI and robotics so they can cut 600,000 jobs,” another person wrote. “Do you think Amazon cares about safety?”

“I find myself floored by the lack of humanity,” another employee wrote, noting they learned about the death from a social media post, not from Amazon.

When Sam returned to work the next day, they saw workers gathered around a screen that displays the employee complaints from the My Voice app for everyone to see.

“It’s so cool in here today,” read one comment on the screen, sent by a worker already on duty. “Did the AC start working before or after we lost an associate? This is an extremely bad look.”

Amazon supervisors responded directly to many of the comments in the app by offering a counseling phone line workers could call, and said people could take unpaid leave if needed. They also offered overtime pay to anyone who continued to work the day following the death, according to Sam. A full week after the death, Sam’s app for tracking their hours showed Amazon had not paid them for the full shift after the workers were sent home early.

Sam said they felt disgusted by the way the man’s death was handled and they are already looking for another job.

“Between being told we should get back to work while a coworker is getting CPR and being told not to help, I just can’t support a corporation like that,” Sam said. “We are just numbers.”

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An estimated 1,300 newsrooms across the country participated in the effort, which Montana Free Press hopes will “spark a national movement that sustains local news for generations.”

In Oregon, Local News Day was preceded by more evidence that Northwest news deserts are expanding, not shrinking. On Wednesday, the editorial staff at the Roseburg News-Review arrived in their office to find pink slips on their desks, according to staff who spoke to The Western Edge. The Southern Oregon newspaper’s owner, Lotus Media, told staff that producing a paper had become “unsustainable” and that “this platform will shift away from a traditional news model.”

What those layoffs mean in practice is hiring people to produce entertainment video clips and rehash press releases from local government under an alleged banner of informing the community. What it means in the broader sense? Another large swath of Oregon has no dedicated local news source.

The Western Edge has long been documenting expanding news deserts in the Pacific Northwest and their deleterious effects; so on the first Local News Day, we wanted to bring you some of our reporting on the News-Review’s closure and a pitch about why letting local news die is catastrophic to the entire media ecosystem.

And — perhaps it should go without saying — it is a great time to get a paid subscription to The Western Edge. Smash that subscribe button, as the kids say.

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The detective woke up strapped to a steel chair. A woman with a flat expression and blonde hair combed back behind her ears looked on.

“Detective Raven, I’m Judge Maddox,” she said. “You’re before this court today, charged with the murder of your wife.”

The detective, played by actor Chris Pratt, spends the next 90 minutes of the 2026 film Mercy trying1 to convince Maddox, an autonomous artificial intelligence judge, of his innocence. The film is set in a bizarre future where the American public has accepted that people charged with crimes are guilty until proven innocent. If someone cannot prove their innocence, they are summarily executed.

The artificial intelligence judge allows Pratt to use a wide array of state surveillance tools to prove his case. He tracks down alternate suspects in his wife’s death using license plate readers, cellphone tracking, police body cameras, even an Instagram account.

Mercy shows a dystopian future. But in real life, Jumana Musa, director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center, said she didn’t see the future when she watched the movie.

“The thing that was most disturbing about that film — because I sat there taking notes while I was watching it — I’d say 90% of the things that are in there are already in use,” she said.

Facial recognition. Doorbell cameras. Intercepted cellular signals. These are all existing police surveillance tools Musa sees regularly in her work as a lawyer.

“It was meant to be this futuristic whatever, but it was actually like - without the AI judge and some of the things they could access – pretty much like a real-time crime center,” Musa said.

Throughout 2025, cities in the Northwest like Olympia, Lynnwood, Eugene and Woodburn showed some skepticism over AI tools, pulling the plug on automated license plate reading cameras operated by Flock Safety due to privacy concerns.

A recent survey by The Western Edge of Northwest cities, police departments and prosecutors found wildly differing views on AI’s future in policing. In some municipalities, prosecutors speak of AI in terms that evoke scenes from Mercy, pointing at ways the technology “hallucinates” fictions that carry human consequences. And, yet, in other cities, officers have threatened revolt if AI isn’t a part of their toolbelt.

Either way, AI technologies are finding their ways into the hands of local law enforcement. This month, at least two police agencies in Oregon expanded their use of AI to write police reports.

“I think the danger is using these tools without the side rails,” said Kevin Barton, the district attorney in Washington County, Oregon. “If a community is going to consider using them, in my opinion, the only responsible way to do that is to make sure that you always prioritize the human being as the final say.”

Meanwhile, one prominent western company, Axon — based in Arizona — is at the forefront of law enforcement’s “AI era,” and is offering police departments financial incentives to get on board.

“What was once just a recording device is now a completely connected communications support tool,” Axon CEO Rick Smith, dressed in a Jobsian black turtle neck and dark slacks, said on stage at the company’s trade show in 2025. “It’s an AI-powered companion that just sits right on your chest.”

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Axon, the everything app

On March 22, 2017, police in Snohomish County, Washington, entered the home of Alex Dold, aiming to break up a domestic dispute. Dold had been off his medication for schizophrenia for months, his sister told KOMO News.

The family called police to get Dold into treatment for his mental health, but at the scene, deputies wrestled with him and used a Taser to shock him into submission. Dold — just 29-years-old — died from cardiac arrest. His case was one of many across the country in which the “less lethal” weapon became plainly lethal.2

By the next month Taser International, the device’s maker, had rebranded to the name of its body camera line, Axon.3

Axon started offering a deal to police departments, which were clamoring for body-worn cameras after high-profile police killings of Black men had drawn national protests: take a free camera for each of your officers for a year.

The catch came when the free trial ended.

“You’ve bought in. You now can’t get your video out if you don’t keep with their system, because now it is their proprietary system that holds the video,” Musa said. “It snowballs from there.”

Over the past two years, Axon has rapidly pushed AI into those same body cameras they put onto the chests of hundreds of thousands of police officers. Motorola, another major player in the police body camera business, has also implemented AI in the past two years.

The Western Edge found Axon has approached many agencies in the past year about a piece of AI-powered software called Draft One, which writes the first draft of police reports based on the audio captured with its body cameras. Axon did not respond to a series of questions for this story.

Portland Police Bureau spokesman Sgt. Kevin Allen said his agency has discussed using Draft One, but felt the technology was “too early” to experiment with. Law enforcement in both large cities like Tacoma, Washington, and smaller cities like Pendleton, Oregon, said they flat out have no interest in AI.4

But police departments in some cities have embraced the technology.

The Medford Police Department, in Southern Oregon, was among the first agencies in the Northwest to automate their report writing with Draft One.

“There was hesitancy,” Sgt. Geoff Kirkpatrick, Medford’s public information officer said in an interview, “but it was very quickly that people were like, ‘If you take this away from us, we will revolt.’ It’s incredible.”

Medford first allowed a select number of officers to use Draft One in August 2024.5 Within three months of starting that testing, the department let all of its officers draft any police report using AI.

“What I was seeing consistently was (the reports) were more detailed than sometimes what you would see in police reports,” Kirkpatrick said.

Medford enabled some safeguards offered by the Draft One system, such as inserting gibberish into a report to ensure officers must read and remove it. Medford police also set a minimum percentage of information that officers must change from the initial AI draft before a report can move forward. The reports, according to Kirkpatrick, are also labeled as being created with Draft One.6

The AI has been a “game changer” for Medford police, as officers have reported saving significant time writing accounts of their public encounters, Kirkpatrick added.

Justin Rosas, a criminal defense lawyer in Medford, believes the local department is trading people’s civil liberties to save time. When Draft One uses audio from a body camera to create a report, it includes bracketed suggestions where an officer might need to fill in more information. Officers who spoke to The Western Edge universally described this as good, a requirement that forces them to closely read the AI-generated text.

In some cases, the program may even recommend adding particular information that could bolster the case. That’s where defense lawyers have concerns about the AI. Arrests and criminal charges are based on probable cause, or an officer’s own reasonable suspicion at the time they take a person into custody. Lawyers like Rosas don’t want AI to fill in the gaps in an officer’s own perception of a situation after an arrest.

“That is so problematic because it’s not in (the officer’s) mind at the time,” Rosas said. “That’s where we get into whether it’s an unreasonable search or seizure.”

Law enforcement who are using Draft One and spoke to The Western Edge downplayed probable cause concerns, noting that officers working without AI can simply watch their own body camera footage if they need to fill in gaps in their report. That’s not the same as AI doing it for you, Rosas said.

“You’re going to have all sorts of cases where the actual information that was in the law enforcement officer’s mind at the time would not be probable cause,” he said.

Rosas worries that Axon is embedding AI into police departments across the country before lawyers have a chance to understand its ramifications for civil liberties. That includes using AI to comb through Ring cameras7 when crimes happen. In October, Axon announced it was partnering with the Amazon-owned company so police departments could more easily tap into the privately-owned cameras. Giving police access to your Ring camera is voluntary, but once a camera owner signs up, the AI can take over, according to Rosas.

“You’ve got this combination of Flock cameras and Ring cameras registered into this national database that Axon’s running, and they’re running a ChatGPT-based AI platform through it to look for suspicious movements,” Rosas said. “You’re getting this sort of automated suspicion.”

He’s also worried about bias that’s deeply coded into systems like ChatGPT because of the material AI trains upon.8 (If you’re concerned, Axon studied its own program in a “double-blind” study with unnamed experts and found Draft One is unbiased.)

Several defense attorneys and investigators who spoke to The Western Edge said adopting programs like Draft One too quickly entrenches Axon and its AI into the criminal justice system in ways that could be difficult to unravel if problems do arise.

“By the time anybody really knows anything about it, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve already been using this everywhere and it’s accurate. You didn’t even notice,’” Rosas said. “Then, the tool survives without actual criticism because it’s prevalent.”

A tiered approach

In September 2024, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Seattle did not water down its criticisms of Draft One.

“It alone decides what parts of the audio are unintelligible. It has ‘hallucinations’ (errors) both large and small. It does not track its rate of errors, or how many errors an officer fixed in prior drafts,” Chief Deputy prosecutor Daniel Clark wrote in a memo to police departments in Washington state’s most populous county, telling them to never submit a report using AI.

“In one example we have seen, an otherwise excellent report included a reference to an officer who was not even at the scene.”

Kevin Barton, the prosecutor in Washington County, Oregon, said King County’s memo was on his mind when the local sheriff’s department asked if it could try out Draft One.

“My initial reaction was a strong ‘no way,’” he told The Western Edge. “I immediately thought about all the ways that it could go wrong.”

In the early fall of last year, Barton sent his own memo telling local law enforcement officers to stay away from AI in their work.

But Barton quickly began to reconsider his hard line after speaking to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, where prosecutors learned about Draft One only after local police began using it without their knowledge. Barton imagined what would happen if he had an AI police report land on his desk without any guardrails in place.

“What we wanted to do was avoid that dynamic where a decision is made elsewhere and then we are living with the results,” he said.

In October, Barton signed off on a phased trial of Draft One at the Washington County Sheriff’s office. The stipulations: only a few deputies could use the program and only on low level cases. But those restrictions proved too limiting, and data from that trial didn’t show much. In December, Barton broadened the test, allowing more deputies to use the software on more charges, including intoxicated driving, retail theft and warrant arrests.9

He again widened the scope earlier this month, on March 10, extending Draft One use to all misdemeanor crimes and a handful of felony charges.10 If Draft One is used in creating a police report, the report in Washington County carries a clear label stating the AI was involved.

“So far, I’ve heard no negatives,” Barton said. “Nothing from the patrol officers or the defense bar or even prosecutors. I’ve only heard positives anecdotally.”

The Bend Police Department in Central Oregon has given a green light to a similar rollout of the program. Bend officers started using Draft One on a limited basis in June 2025 after Axon made an irresistible offer: try out two years of Draft One for free.11 Bend, which saved more than $100,000 for its own budget with the deal, soon had AI working alongside a small group of officers.

“Speaking candidly,” police Capt. Nicholas Parker said, “that first pilot group didn’t really care for it.”

The tests started with cases where officers didn’t have a suspect, such as car break-ins, because it meant the crime was unlikely to go to a prosecutor. Experienced officers using Draft One for low-level cases found the AI program spat out lengthy reports that they spent more time editing than if they had written it themselves.

In November, the department switched to testing the program with newer officers, who liked it. Draft One helped organize their thoughts into a clear report narrative – an essential skill for officers called to testify in court.

“It helped,” Parker said, “but they’re not developing that skill at the same time.”

On March 26, Bend police entered the last phase of its trial and opened the program to any officer in the department who wanted to try it. Officers can’t use it on the most serious cases - arson, homicides, sex crimes - but it will be the widest use of Draft One the department has seen.

Parker isn’t sure if his agency will keep Draft One after the free trial ends, however. He’s told officers that anything generated by AI needs to be reviewed by a person. If Draft One makes serious mistakes or doesn’t save officers time, Bend may decide to drop the program.12

The future of AI

Axon is not the only company traveling to police departments across the country to proselytize officers on the wonders of AI.

Wandering the streets of Elizabeth, New Jersey, on a cold winter morning ahead of a meeting with the city’s police chief, George Cheng explained how he dropped out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a handful of venture capital cash from Silicon Valley and a dream to bring AI to more police departments.

Cheng, a co-founder of the nascent company Code Four, designed an artificial intelligence system for body cameras that goes beyond Draft One’s capabilities, using both video and audio from the cameras to create police reports.

“We’re seeing a ton of hallucinations from a ton of departments using Draft One,” Cheng said, pointing to a report late last year that erroneously claimed an officer in Heber City, Utah, turned into a frog; the Axon camera audio captured a children’s movie playing in the background.

“Our AI understands that like, ‘Hey, this background noise isn’t necessarily relevant,’” Cheng said of his company’s technology.

Cheng sees a future where police records and tools consolidate into “one or two softwares” that write reports, handle paperwork and communicate across the criminal justice system. Code Four wants to be one of those softwares. He believes his company has an advantage in the next wave of AI in policing: Code Four has worked on video intelligence tools for Palantir, the massive data analytics company most recently in the news for its surveillance work with the U.S. government.

Axon also has broader ambitions. Its recent marketing materials tout how the company’s body cameras will soon have livestreaming options and the ability to connect law enforcement to cameras in retail and health care settings. Some Northwest police departments, such as Medford, are ready to handle more police work with AI, too. They’d like to see officers using Axon’s live language translation services next, and then have officers receive advice on legal precedent from the AI inside their body cameras.

Musa, the Fourth Amendment Center director, wants more consideration before police departments buy into an AI-powered future promised by technology companies trying to make money.

The very companies pushing this technology have made big promises before, she said, pointing to how body cameras became ubiquitous among police departments on a promise they would reduce the number of fatal interactions between officers and the public. Those deaths have only increased since Axon started cornering the body camera market in 2017.13

“When you have a systemic problem,” Musa said, “you’re not going to solve it by putting technology on it.”

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But long before much of the public knew the name Gregory Bovino, who until this month was acting as “commander-at-large” for the U.S. Border Patrol, investigative reporter Sergio Olmos was documenting his rise for CalMatters.

Olmos’ latest investigation, “Agents of Chaos: Border Patrol’s Year of Unchecked Force,” for the first time identifies a team of agents who traveled the country with Bovino to carry out some the most consequential violence.

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He sat down with Ryan Haas of The Western Edge to discuss his job holding the government accountable, being in the right place at the right time on big stories, and how the language of war is seeping into discourse around U.S. immigration policy.

Our new video series, Notes from the Edge, will offer behind-the-scenes looks at the reporting we do, talking about details that couldn’t make it into the story. For our inaugural episode, we are talking about our March feature, “The Shady Cop Who Haunts Halloweentown.”

We share how we first came across Police Chief Brian Greenway while reporting on the second season of the podcast Hush and what the political turmoil in St. Helens, Oregon, tells us more broadly about cultures of grievance.

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I am 13. My best friend’s father, who had just attended the WTO protests in Seattle, shows us the pockmark on his chest from a rubber bullet. I can’t compute why the police would shoot him. He’s a middle-aged dad, an environmental lawyer. I assume there was some kind of mix-up.

I am 17. I volunteer to help guide a march of fellow students through downtown Portland as we protest funding cuts. I am hoping to impress one of the organizers, who is a cute girl. The power of the march as it cuts through blockaded streets is intoxicating.

I am 29. I put my 18-month-old child on my shoulders to march along with the Women’s March on Inauguration Day, 2017. The crowd fills Portland’s Waterfront Park. My heart swells at the thought that we will not stay quiet, no matter what is coming.

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I am 32 years old. I attend my first Black Lives Matter protest as a volunteer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. I wear a cloth mask because no one outside of a hospital can get medical-grade ones. It is Juneteenth 2020. My supervisor gives me a thin, blue vest of plastic mesh with the words “ACLU LEGAL OBSERVER” on it. Legal observers are a neutral party, and I am tasked with taking video and notes on everything that happens. There needs to be a record that goes beyond police reports.

I am 32. The Portland Police have just been court-ordered from interfering with media and Legal Observers; tonight is the first test. When the police form a riot line and sweep toward us, it is a terrifying display of force, but we stand to one side, separated from the protesters, and let the riot line pass. It feels strange to be so isolated from the action. We follow the police several blocks toward the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. There’s a stand-off, then when the police finally leave, they plink the crowd with rubber bullets from their van as they pull away. A protester shows me the red, angry welts on their stomach. I capture their testimony on camera and archive it with the ACLU.

I am 32. I have cobbled together protective gear out of woodworking safety goggles and my uncle-in-law’s paint respirator. Trump has swollen the ranks of the Federal Protective Service, and its agents seem to have endless supplies of tear gas. The first time the gas hits me, it immediately comes in through the vents in my goggles. I stumble, crying, back out of the crowd, and rinse my eyes with water. Nearby, a protester keeps up a chant urging people to go back into the gas to show them “we aren’t scared.”

I am 32 and I’m standing in a park across from the federal courthouse, next to a tent called Riot Ribs that serves food to the protesters. Their food is heavy on the spice, which is a joke about tear gas. It’s July 24, 2020, and I am wearing a blue helmet, the color that evokes NATO peacekeepers. It has a large “ACLU OF OREGON LEGAL OBSERVER” sticker on it. I am standing far back from the crowd when I am hit on the side of the head with what feels like a hammer. In reality, a less-lethal marking round has grazed the area between my helmet and my ear. It coats the side of my head and the inside of my helmet with fluorescent pink dust. According to other Legal Observers, federal agents use these rounds to identify repeat riot offenders. I am dazed, but not concussed.

I am 32. I am writing a report about getting shot in the head. I mark up a map of the courthouse and the park, and as I do, I imagine the federal sniper who decided they could squeeze a shot off at a Legal Observer standing in the back and not suffer any consequences. It makes me furious that they are right.

I am 33. I am seeing my kid’s elementary school for the first time. It is directly next door to the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement building in the South Waterfront, a regular site for protests. At night, the school’s playground is wreathed in clouds of white smoke.

I am 33. I decide to join the other Legal Observers on their cigarette break. When I pull off my new, full-face respirator, I feel the stinging tear gas still hanging in the air. We laugh about how I mistook it for harmless smoke. I love my new respirator. It feels good to breathe. I take a drag from my cigarette.

I am 33. I am sitting outside my house. ACLU Legal Observers are at a protest across town, and I see a plane circling in the distance, over and over, and think it probably belongs to the police department. It makes me furious. I feel like I am letting everyone down when I’m not there to watch. But my child is asleep inside and I can’t go to a protest. I have a cigarette and watch the plane.

I am 33. I am home, still awake, reading that my supervisor is being arrested at a police station. In the process of arresting her, they sprain her wrist as they’re yanking her arms behind her back. They also choke-slam her partner, a law student, to the ground. After this, her partner stops going to protests. It feels like they’ve been planning this, like they’re trying to scare us, keep us from keeping watch. It works.

I am 33. I am researching body armor. My friend tells me to get a $300 vest that might stop a bullet from a handgun. I can’t afford it, so I continue to wear a padded vest made for paintballing.

I am 33. I am helping to train new Legal Observers. We have a high burn-out rate but I have stuck around long enough to have a little bit of seniority. Sometimes people ask my opinion about the program. I’m never sure how to answer, except that I know it’s important to keep watching.

I am 34. It is Feb. 19, 2022, and I’m walking along the side of Normandale Park, in Northeast Portland. I am trailing behind a protest over the 2018 shooting of Patrick Kimmons in Portland and the 2022 shooting of Amir Locke in Minneapolis. As the rally prepares to start marching toward a police precinct building, we hear pops from the west end of the park. I think they’re fireworks. They are gunshots.

I am 34. In the weeks following the Normandale Park shooting, the ACLU of Oregon tells me that they are putting the Legal Observer program on hiatus. They are worried that they cannot protect us. I am upset: If there is violence, who will be there to observe, to witness? After this, I stop attending protests as an observer. There are no more calls from the ACLU of Oregon. I put my vest and gear away in my basement.

I am 34. I am sitting outside my house. My child is asleep. I am smoking one of the last stale cigarettes in the pack I’d been taking to protests. I have always loved smoking, but this cigarette makes me feel furious, and scared, and anxious. I watch planes fly overhead. I am crying. I realize I need help.

I am 34. I am buying cigarettes. My smoking started again when I went out to protests, but I set rules for myself. I got three cigarettes per night: the first when I arrived, as an incentive for getting out of the house. The second was for surviving something intense. The third was to wind down before going home. At least twice, I was halfway through that third cigarette when another unexpected, intense thing happened, which meant I could bum a fourth cigarette to wind down again later (and so on).

Now, though, I smoke late at night at home, or outside bars, but nothing about it is enjoyable or relaxing. Smoking makes me feel like my insides are closing up. Each cigarette transports me back to the protests, like a chemically-induced flashback, watching and waiting for the worst to happen. By continuing to smoke, I’ve given trauma a cheat-code to get into my brain.

I am 35 and I create an arrangement with a friend. I will meet him at a bar to smoke and talk about what I experienced at the protests. I smoke cigarettes, he smokes cigars. I tell him what I saw, how and when I was hurt, how angry I still am. Changing how and when I have cigarettes helps. So does talking.

I am 36. My child is at school, about to finish third grade. I’m sitting at my cluttered desk in my basement, trying to write this essay about being a Legal Observer. I cannot think of a title. In the cabinet to my left is a cardboard box containing all the things I needed quick access to when I went out to protests. My blue ACLU vest is in the box, still attached to my backpack, on top of my respirator and helmet. This vest and this essay are both important to me but I am having a hard time choosing the correct words to explain why. The only things I can write are lists of events, the same way I wrote notes while I was observing. I remember the first time I saw a welt from a rubber bullet when I was 13.

I am 36 and standing with my partner in the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s gallery, viewing an exhibit of artifacts, interviews and art about Portland’s 2020 BLM protests. They have digitally reconstructed the events of the Normandale Park Shooting, including footage from a volunteer’s helmet-mounted camera. There is video of Benjamin Smith, a man who lived nearby, who heard the protest and came out of his house, confronted the march volunteers and then shot several of them with a pistol. A 60-year-old volunteer who went by the name T-Rex was killed, another called Deg was paralyzed, and later died, and others were terribly hurt. I am crying. I cannot watch the footage. I excuse myself and wait for my partner outside. She hugs me for a long time.

I am 36. My helmet still has traces of pink from where the marking round snuck underneath its rim. I am putting on my full-face 3M respirator, size L, with organic vapor / particulate filters. Hair in a ponytail, mask on over the head, tighten the top straps loosely, tighten the bottom straps all the way, tighten the top straps until it pinches your skull. Cover the filter inlets with your hands and take a deep breath. You should feel the rubber seal all around the mask pulling at your face. A little stubble is helpful, but too much facial hair makes a poor fit. I go to the backyard and shake out an old rug, then return my mask to the cardboard box. I think about the banality of using a mask for simple dust protection.

I am 36. Voters oust Portland’s progressive district attorney, Mike Schmidt. They’ve elected a guy whose Facebook ads show him at the firing range. The new guy has promised to be tough on crime and clean up this city like some kind of Gotham. The 2024 presidential election is less than six months away, and it seems possible Trump could be re-elected. I am furious because it feels like the protests accomplished nothing. I do not think the ACLU of Oregon will allow any of us to put our vests on again.

I am 36. I have decided I have to quit smoking because I want to have cigarettes all the time.

I am 37. It is Election Night, 2024. The governor pre-emptively mobilizes the National Guard to prevent damage in Downtown Portland. There are only a few protests. I don’t even consider going out, vest or not. It feels like people have nothing left to say tonight.

I am 37. Protests are growing at the ICE Headquarters in Portland, which is also next door to a Tesla dealership, which is also next door to the school where my kid is now in fourth grade. I am waiting for school to let out at the end of the day and watching the activists stockpile water and make signs. When one of them comes up to talk to me, I realize that I’ve been watching too closely and probably look suspicious. I tell them I was an ACLU Legal Observer for years. I don’t think they believe me. I tuck the KNOW YOUR RIGHTS card they give me into my wallet.

I am 37. Protests at the ICE building continue to grow after Los Angeles, the deportations to El Salvador, the increased raids across the country. My child’s playground is saturated with tear gas and is no longer safe to play on. Less than a month before school starts, the teachers pack everything up and move the school to a different building, a mile away. The teachers and parents have been honest with the children, and they’ve seen the protests. They understand why they need to move.

I am 37. I attend a No More Kings rally downtown. My Legal Observer vest is still at home in its cardboard box. Before the march, some people I know ask if I have any advice about whether it’s safe to participate. I tell them to go. We show up, mill around, then march – along the river and across one of the bridges, where traffic comes to a standstill and stranded drivers emerge from their cars, raising their fists in solidarity. “It’s important to be seen,” the protestors around me say.

I am 37. I haven’t had a cigarette in over a year.

I am 37. Trump deploys the National Guard to Washington, DC. He threatens to send troops to Portland to quell a non-existent insurrection. The protests grow. From my house, I can see a plane circling above the building that used to be my child’s school.

I am 37. I am still writing this essay. My fury and despair are an open pit in my chest, an abyss that I fall into when I try to write the details of the time I spent as a Legal Observer. Tears still leak out when I ask myself why I did it, why I decided to go watch, night after night. I went because it is important to keep watching.

I turn 38. In Minneapolis, people opposed to ICE are shot and killed. In Portland, children are gassed during a daytime protest. Muscled men from an alphabet soup of federal agencies tackle anyone they think is standing too close to the ICE building. Night after night, the apartments, restaurants and businesses, and schools nearby are inundated with clouds of tear gas.

I am 38.

A friend asks if I would ever go back out as an ACLU Legal Observer, if I were asked.

Of course I say yes.

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In the foggy city of St Helens, Oregon, a tall stone courthouse backs up to the wide Columbia River. It was the backdrop for Halloweentown, a 1998 children’s movie about a girl transported to a town of witches and ghosts. Every October since, St Helens has held the month-long Spirit of Halloweentown festival in honor of the film, where the square in front of the courthouse is filled with pumpkins and cornstalks, and there are haunted houses and psychic readings.1

Until 2023, there was a parade, too. But that ended after charter buses and thousands of people showed up in the small town. Traffic was awful, the sidewalks were crammed, people were pushing each other, and it seemed like Halloweentown had officially gotten too big for St Helens.

A week later, in a small gray-walled room just off the town square, Halloweentown organizers sat in front of the city council and said the parade would be cancelled unless they got more help from local police.

“They’re not supportive in any way,” organizer Heather Epperly said. “All we had was our private volunteers. It was really disturbing. ”

St Helens Chief of Police Brian Greenway stepped up and disputed Epperly’s characterization.

“For people to come up here and slander the St Helens Police department,” he said, growing angry. “Unacceptable.”

Greenway worked events during his 25 years at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, he said. “I know what I am doing folks. Alright? And when I am telling you this, please heed the warning. We are woefully understaffed to hold these events.”2

In Las Vegas, the family-friendly Halloweentown would have been staffed by 40 officers, Greenway said. St Helens Police employed 21.

“But we’re not Vegas,” Mayor Rick Scholl replied.

Scholl — who has a beard and long hair, and wore his typical University of Oregon Ducks hat and t-shirt — encouraged Greenway to be calm.

“We are a community as a whole — a very small community — and we try to work together,” Scholl explained. “I think there’s stuff we can do better.”

Greenway, his officers and some of their wives had frequently told the mayor and council they needed new cars, a new police station, more money and more officers. Scholl appeared to agree.

“We hear the wives of the officers,” Scholl assured Greenway. “We definitely care about our police department.”

After the meeting, Scholl took Greenway aside and asked him to apologize publicly for losing his temper at the Halloweentown organizers.

It would be months before Greenway apologized. But when he finally did, it would trigger an acrimonious, years-long feud that would spread far past council chambers, and Halloweentown, into the citizenry.

The fallout of that apology would eventually lead to Greenway’s resignation in disgrace, voters booting Scholl from office, bitter political rivalries forming, and the police officers union directly targeting city leaders in its desire for more money.

It would also lead to a contentious 2024 election cycle, when residents chose a new mayor: Jennifer Massey, a union steamfitter, private investigator and wife of a St Helens police officer.

Through an analysis of more than 2,500 pages of newly-released public records and extensive interviews over the past month, The Western Edge has revealed for the first time just how far the small police force in St. Helens was willing to go in its bid for power and money, and how quickly unchecked corruption threw a community into chaos.

St Helens faces a new mayor’s race this year. But the city has not yet found a way to move on from the 2024 election. And with entrenched factions now screaming at each other nearly daily online and in person, it’s unclear if the town will.

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In December 2019, St Helens city employees in red and green sweaters piled into council chambers for the annual staff holiday party, where they ate at long buffet tables from paper plates, and held a white elephant gift exchange.

Each year, the same gifts went around — a unicorn head, a silly hat, pink underwear. That year, after everything had been re-gifted, the staffers posed for a photo. City Administrator John Walsh got the unicorn head, and put it atop his own. A woman yanked the underwear up over her black slacks, and everyone stood in front of the council’s dais with their gag gifts as the city recorder took a photo.3 According to multiple sources, Chief Brian Greenway asked the city recorder to send that photo to him.

Four years passed.

On Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024, Greenway stepped up to the microphone at city hall and read a brief apology, acknowledging he should have listened to the concerns expressed by the Halloweentown committee about the parade and not gotten so heated. Mayor Scholl thanked him.

Less than 24 hours later, an email from a “Concerned Citizen” arrived in the inboxes of Scholl, Walsh, the councilors, county commissioners and several members of the media.

Subject line: “Resignation demand.”

Attachment: the white elephant photo from the 2019 holiday party.

“The pictures are from a city of St Helens Christmas party, attended by City Administrator John Walsh and Mayor Rick Scholl. At this party, both allowed and participated in bullying a young woman into a pair of pink panties and then posed for a picture,” it read. “This is disgusting and I am demanding both John Walsh and Rick Scholl resign immediately.”

“I am beyond disgusted by this. Photos do not lie, and I, along with many others will not stand to have 2 grown men sexually exploit women…. How can we allow the bullying, harassment, hazing and sexual exploitation of women. How many more victims will suffer? Silence is compliance.”

This Concerned Citizen had written to officials before. For years, the account would sporadically surface to lob complaints about Columbia County sheriff’s deputies, or express anger about how St Helens was spending its budget. One email read, “We need more money to hire police officers.” Sometimes the account was signed “Ron Johnson, Scappoose, Oregon.” Others were signed by “A TAX PAYING resident!”4

The Concerned Citizen emailed again a few days later over the “Panty Gate” scandal — as it is known in local parlance — demanding that Scholl and Walsh lose their jobs. Meanwhile, Greenway texted two members of the St Helens Police Association (SHPA), the local officers union, about Scholl and Walsh.

“Rick is a moron,” wrote Bryan Cutright, then-vice president of the officers’ union. “Can I claim OT if the mayor is calling and wanting a callback?”

“2 times I don’t call that guy. On duty or off duty,” wrote Dylan Gaston, the union president.

“F him,” Greenway wrote.

“He’s such an idiot,” Cutright responded. “I can’t believe the system we have lets him have so much power.”

The chief and his officers were angry over police staffing — a point Greenway cited at the council meeting when he blew up over the Halloweentown parade. The city and the department couldn’t seem to find a compromise: Officers wanted to work 10-hour shifts, but that left gaps each day when St. Helens didn’t have enough police for patrol. Greenway asked for more money to hire officers, and for millions to construct a new police station. But by the first week of 2024, some 40% of the city’s general fund was already going to the police department. (Greenway did not respond to a request for comment by The Western Edge.)

By Jan. 10, Greenway’s texts with the two union officers shifted from making jokes about the mayor to Greenway coaching them on what to say at a public meeting that night with Scholl, Walsh and council. “Failure to keep our residents safe through properly staffing and housing the police will result in the city having a new mayor come November,” Greenway texted. “SHPA has lost confidence in the ability of our mayor and city administrator to effectively do their job by placing our residents safety at risk. Just some thoughts.”

This conversation was highly unusual. Greenway was overstepping as the police department’s top leader — someone who union officers would sit across from at a bargaining table, and who would be responsible for disciplining anyone who violated department policy. Walsh was also his boss.

Within hours of that text message, Cutright and Gaston read from statements at the meeting. Greenway listened silently as they lodged a vote of no confidence in both Scholl and Walsh, who they wanted gone. “I implore you all as councilmen and women in this city to force them out of their positions,” Cutright said.

Gaston claimed that by not caving to the union’s demands, the city was effectively defunding the police. “The dictionary definition of ‘defund’ is to prevent a group or organization from continuing to receive funds,” Gaston said, demanding that the city figure out how to pay for more officers and a new police station immediately. “The decision will undoubtedly affect your political careers.”

After the meeting, the three policemen were energized by the public shaming.

“Rick and Walsh need to go,” Greenway texted the next day.

“Oh they’re both toast,” Cutright said. “They’re going to get pushed out. And I’m going to make sure of it. Fuck them both.”

The union was trying to get Scholl’s attention. One St. Helens police officer’s wife was trying to do the same.

“Dude… we need you to get this fixed,” Jennifer Massey texted Scholl at the end of January 2024. “We need you.”

Scholl did not respond.

Massey texted him four more times, asking the mayor to meet in person with her friend, a local political strategist named Jennifer Gilbert.

“We want to talk to you about your campaign this year. We’re hoping that some things can get straightened out and we can help your election,” she said. She and Gilbert did not want a local lawyer, Steve Toschi, to win the upcoming race for the mayor’s office.

“Hey, this is my last effort to try to get ahold of you,” she texted again two days later. “Are you willing to meet and chat? You should also know we have nothing to do with the police association. This is not pertaining to that.”

Scholl never responded.

Weeks later, Massey’s mind had changed. She wouldn’t help Scholl win; she would run against him.

“I am honored to present myself as a candidate for mayor of our beloved city,” she wrote one February morning on Facebook. “My vision for our city is progress, prosperity, trust, and unity through transparency and accountability.”

Massey’s vision echoed a Facebook page she ran called Columbia County Transparency & Accountability, where she posted public records and discussed local issues. She was becoming more well-known in St Helens because of a nonprofit she founded called FAFODDS5 with police union president Dylan Gaston’s wife, Brianna Gaston. The group was part amateur sleuths, part City Hall watchers. Massey’s daughter, Mercedes, and a local man named Adam St Pierre, joined, too.

FAFODDS seemed to be everywhere that spring, having gained a reputation through another Facebook page: Justice for Sarah Zuber, which provided information about the unsolved death of a local 18-year-old girl.6

As Massey revved up her campaign, the FAFODDS crew was vocal about the police budget and allegations of financial fraud by the Halloweentown organizers.

In April, Massey, who works at a Portland mechanical services company, sat before the council and described getting a tour of the police station where her husband worked. “That place is worse than a portable trailer we drag out onto the job sites,” she said.

That month, FAFODDS also handed over a “litany of allegations” against the Halloweentown planners to Greenway, according to a detective at the department who was tasked with looking into them.

But as summer arrived in St Helens, FAFODDS seemed to be growing angry that no one was being held accountable. Massey and St Pierre started showing up at council meetings, hammering a drumbeat that fraud had occurred, and Walsh — having supervised Halloweentown — should be removed from his job.

“I’m just befuddled John Walsh isn’t on administrative leave at this point,” Massey said to the council over Zoom in August. “He’s just bad at his job.”

“Rick,” she said again in early September, “the fact that you have not put this man, John Walsh, on administrative leave at this point and had this looked into…should be a huge concern. I am gravely concerned about what may be found here.”

It seemed that Greenway, Massey and the anonymous Concerned Citizen had the same goals.

By fall, the St Helens mayor’s race was fully underway, and its three candidates sparred publicly and online.

There was Scholl: a landscaper and lifelong Columbia County resident who had been mayor since 2017 and put less than $1,000 into his re-election bid.7

He was up against big spenders.

Steve Toschi — a lawyer with an expertise in fraud cases who had recently moved to St Helens8 — poured tens of thousands into his bid for mayor. Toschi wanted to bring wealth into the community, and spoke on the campaign trail of finding ways to keep unhoused people from sleeping on city streets.

Massey spent tens of thousands on her campaign, too. On her signs and mailers, her face was next to the St. Helens Police Association logo.

Since at least 2021, St. Helens officials had deliberated over what to do about police staffing and talked about a day when 24-hour police service could go away.

For unclear reasons, mere weeks before voters cast ballots in the pivotal mayor’s race, around-the-clock police service abruptly stopped.

Greenway stood outside the police station and explained to a television reporter from Portland that St Helens police could no longer patrol at all hours, leaving a four-hour gap unstaffed.

“The chief wouldn’t say what hours officers won’t be out patrolling for obvious reasons,” the reporter said at the end of the segment.

But those hours wouldn’t stay secret long. That night, Jennifer Gilbert — Massey’s friend — slammed Scholl and Walsh at a city council meeting for causing the cuts and jeopardizing public safety by not spending more on police.

“I know of one officer who worked their shift, went home at 3 a.m. to bed, 45 minutes later was called back out,” Gilbert said, making it clear the specific times when St Helens was without police.

Afterward, Greenway was irate. Gilbert later said that she only knew those specific policeless hours because Massey had told her just before the council meeting: It was her husband, Terry, who had been called out overnight.

Confusion over policing deepened in the city when Walsh, the city administrator, put Greenway on leave within a week of that meeting. Out of public view, Walsh fired off emails to top leaders saying he’d recently learned Greenway had allegedly engaged in “unethical behaviors.” He was in talks with a third-party investigator to look into Greenway.9

That investigator, a former Oregon police chief named Jim Band, said he’d not only look into Greenway’s fixation with police staffing and claims he’d obstructed recruitment efforts, but that he had bullied people inside and outside the department, and egged on the officers’ union to undermine city leaders.

Before the public knew why Greenway was put on leave, Massey hopped into her car and drove 34 miles from St Helens to his home in Vancouver, Washington.

She told The Western Edge that she made the trip, instead of calling him, to demand answers about what was happening. She explained that, as a licensed private investigator, she and FAFODDS “wanted the exact reason he was put on leave.”

They were concerned St. Helens may have retaliated against him.

Greenway knew his time as police chief was ending. His lawyer wrote to the city just weeks before the 2024 election, offering a golden parachute deal for the chief’s silent departure.

“If the City wants to skip the Greenway investigation, which would yield little if anything, Chief Greenway would agree to the following terms,” the email stated before asking for a year’s salary, a job reference and tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for allegedly unused paid leave.

As Massey was winning over the public in the mayoral election by lambasting Scholl’s handling of the police, behind the scenes people were coming forward with damning evidence against Greenway.

Dustin King, a former corporal at the department, said Greenway created a dangerous policy banning St. Helens officers from helping neighboring departments. King described an officer who had recently traveled outside city limits to stop an active shooter.

“He was very upset when this policy came out and the chief told all of us in a staff meeting when he pushed this policy, ‘If you don’t like it, you can work somewhere else,’” King said.

Then there was Cutright, the union vice president who worked with Greenway and Gaston to push the no confidence vote against Scholl and Walsh. Cutright said Greenway let him skip a physical fitness test required of all officers, and gave him a raise as if he had passed anyway.10

“He said that he was going to write down my time and I was not going to run it,” Cutright said. “I kind of looked at him a little weird, and he said, ‘Is that a problem?’ And I said, ‘Guess not.’”

One young detective described how Greenway screamed at him. The department’s second-in-command said Greenway sabotaged hiring more officers so the city would feel pain and give the police department more money. Other officers told Band how Greenway referred to the local sheriff as “muffin tits,” how he’d log into public Zoom meetings in neighboring cities under names like “Mike Oxlong” or send pornographic memes to officers as a gag.

Det. Matt Smith said Greenway summoned him to his office on April 15, 2024, just two months after Jennifer Massey had launched her mayoral campaign, and handed him a letter from FAFODDS outlining their beliefs in alleged Halloweentown fraud.

Greenway told Smith that Walsh needed to be placed on leave because he had overseen the alleged fraud — echoing FAFODDS’ talking points. Smith quickly turned the investigation over to the FBI and IRS; later, he described being caught between his boss, Greenway, and Massey, a citizen and political candidate.

“This has caused me to try and placate everyone involved,” he wrote to his supervisor.11 “Constantly assure Mrs. Massey that the feds will handle the case, to be patient and not post anything on social media,12 while also resisting all efforts by Chief Greenway for updates and Mrs. Massey to write follow up reports and continue the investigation.”

Massey and Greenway seemed to want the same things: get rid of Scholl and Walsh, and secure more money for police in St. Helens.

Looking back, Scholl believes he came under fire because he wouldn’t capitulate to police union demands.

“(The union was) just being crybabies. That’s what it is,” Scholl told The Western Edge. “They were shaking us down for more money.”

In the heat of the election, residents on Facebook agreed with Massey that Scholl wasn’t supportive of police. Scholl, who will refer to Facebook as “Fakebook” at any opportunity, refused to duke it out online.

On Election Day, after a vicious three-way race, voters ousted Scholl.

Massey won.13

The final report about Greenway by the investigator, Jim Band, landed on her desk mere weeks after she was sworn in.

“Chief Greenway seems to have worked up the union and members of the public with misguided information,” Band wrote. “Greenway seemed more preoccupied with some sort of personal vendettas against former Mayor Rick Scholl and City Administrator John Walsh than with the community expectation of his job as chief.”

Band also concluded that the city had not defunded the police at all, noting that the budget had doubled under Scholl’s time as mayor from around $2.8 million in 2018 to $5.6 million in 2024 — a budget that was was comparable, or better, than other similarly-sized Oregon cities.

Greenway was on leave, but with Massey’s win, he’d gotten what he’d wanted: a new mayor who believed the police needed more.

But the drama was not over.

At the request of a city attorney who was growing increasingly suspicious that Massey had worked with Greenway during the 2024 election to stir up fears around a policeless town, Band produced a supplemental report.14

He spoke to Jennifer Gilbert, Massey’s friend and political strategist. The pair had a falling out, and Gilbert offered Band information about what she knew.

In the end, Band drew no conclusions about Massey’s relationship with Greenway; he did not interview Massey because the former chief resigned abruptly, effectively ending the investigation.15

In an interview, Massey answered questions by The Western Edge about the nature of her relationship with Greenway. She went out to eat with the chief two years before the election, spoke with him on the phone about issues around department canines and had only seen him in passing at police events.

“I didn’t have a bad opinion of him,” she said. “He seemed very factual, technical.”

She denied allegations that she colluded with Greenway on halting 24-hour police service in the final stretch of the mayor’s race. A spokesperson from St. Helens told The Western Edge the department “currently staffs two 10-hour shifts per day and covers the remaining four hours through a combination of on call officers and/or overtime.”16

Still, some people in St. Helens don’t buy Massey’s story.

Gilbert is one of the leading voices in a growing chorus of residents who see Massey continuing Greenway’s no-holds-barred approach to local politics.

“There was rumors that she and the Chief had been colluding, and then a bunch of stuff clicked in my head,” Gilbert said to Band during the investigation. “And I was like, ‘Do you have any explanation for what’s going on?’ And she was like, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ And she got kind of defensive, but she’s like, ‘I don’t even know what happened.’”

Last year, in February 2025, after the St. Helens City Council voted to publicly release a redacted version of Band’s investigation, Gilbert checked her post office box. Inside, there was a letter from a “Concerned Citizen,” mailed from Portland.

It contained just one line:

“OOPS,” it read. “YOU HAVE BEEN FOUND OUT.”

Steve Toschi lives in a restored craftsman overlooking the Columbia River with a view of boats docked in long lines and fog moving across the landscape.

One afternoon this February, he wore jeans held up by suspenders and a red plaid shirt. He sat at his kitchen table, a wild enthusiasm in his eyes as he spoke about Mayor Massey and her connections to the city’s police union.

“The integrity of the police department is being compromised,” he said. “Pretty soon people are going to say the word of a St. Helens police officer isn’t good. ‘You guys are crooked.’”

Toschi came in third place in the November 2024 election, and afterward figured he’d step back from city politics.

But when Band’s redacted report became public, he flipped through the 108 pages and felt himself growing angrier.

Toschi filed a lawsuit against St Helens, seeking all of Band’s investigative files and an unredacted version of the full report — revealing his sources. Last month, he won.

The release of public records in any other city might not be cause for news, but when the city dropped thousands of pages of Band’s files into the public sphere, local Facebook pages exploded with commentary.

“BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS!!!!” read one local poster.

The comments made one thing clear: no one in St Helens saw the records the same.

“A victory for the people for sure!” wrote one local woman on a post by Toschi.

“​​Toschi is an idiot, it’s total bullish!t that he continues to try and push this narrative!” wrote another resident on a post by Massey.

Toschi was at home reading the texts between Greenway, Cutright and Gaston. “I think the cops weren’t saying we want a new station. The cops are saying, ‘we want a raise, we want more money. We want more stuff. We want better gear. We want dogs, we want new cars, we want body cameras,’” he told The Western Edge. “I see the police union saying ‘we want power. We want influence.’”

Toschi characterizes the 24-hour police crisis of 2024 as an unauthorized “strike” by local police refusing to work.

“Our people were actually put in danger by this behavior,” he said. “Massey shamed us. Greenway shamed us. Our police association shamed us.”

He believes the records show the police union capitalizing on public safety fears as a way to install Massey, who would finally open the city’s checkbook to the officers.

“We’ve got our pig pig pigs — I mean, our greedy police,” Toschi said. “Do we reward them or do we say, ‘You guys need to manage yourselves?’”

In her first year as mayor, Toschi made a complaint to the Oregon Department of Justice alleging that Massey and Greenway created a crisis out of the 24-hour policing issue to win the election.

In November 2025, the DOJ declined to investigate further, saying it was “unlikely an investigation will produce evidence of corrupt or coercive activity on the part of Massey to support a prosecution.”

Toschi has no kind words for the DOJ, but admits what many people in St Helens will not: In more than 2,500 pages of records, there is no smoking gun proving Greenway and Massey colluded. Still, he doesn’t believe Massey is innocent.

“I don’t think I have to put the four after 2 + 2,” he said. “At some point, we as human beings need to realize that people who are trying to get away with shit deny that they did it. And it’s up to us to come to the appropriate conclusion.

“You know why I have it out for Jennifer? People who live in the ethical world like me, I judge her. I think she is scum. She’s dangerous. She’s a liar. She’s a cheat. She isn’t who she says she is. She’s a fraud. Those are words that I use for people like her.”

Later this year, the St Helens mayor’s election will happen again. Toschi said he is considering another run for office, but hasn’t decided yet.

For now, he is content being one of several loud voices who show up to city council meetings to talk across the room at Massey, who sits at the center of the dais. It’s a fight he won’t let go.

“Here at ground zero in our little tiny town, we have a serious corruption issue. So don’t complain to me about Trump or Biden or the Democrats or the Republicans, when you’re not willing to pay attention to this place,” he said. “Don’t you want this place to be better? Don’t you want St. Helens to be the gem of the river that it could be?”

On the day the documents became public, Jennifer Massey felt overjoyed.

“This is like Christmas for me,” she told The Western Edge. “I have been waiting for over a year.”

She invoked a value she’s championed since before her mayoral campaign: transparency. “Toschi shouldn’t have had to go to the extent he did for public records,” she said.

“I guess it was a relief for me personally because there’s that veil of mystique and all of that stuff that people can create narratives,” she said. “And when you just put the documents out there, they’re out there.”

She explained that she started to have a problem with Scholl and Walsh when she felt like they ignored her citizen sleuth organization, FAFODDS, and its allegations around the Halloweentown finances.

“We would send emails to [Scholl] and he would just ignore us, and would not respond, wouldn’t even open the emails,” she said. “We felt as citizens, if there were concerns and you’re sending information, that you owe, as an elected official, you should at least open them … we were just ignored for over two years.”

In a small city, people have a closeness with city leaders. They expect them to work for them. And Massey felt entitled to their attention.

“What we were doing is basically being the voice of many citizens,” she said.

The documents show one leader was listening to FAFODDS: Greenway. When she handed over their Halloweentown investigation, he told a detective it was a top priority. If Massey had questions, she said, he would talk to her on the phone.

But Scholl didn’t make time for her.

“These are the things that drove me eventually to wanting to run for office as my frustration kept building. It’s like, okay, so now you do all this work, and you’re trying to present information for key stakeholders that actually can make decisions, and it’s falling on deaf ears?” she said.

Even though Massey said she supports Band’s investigative files becoming public, she downplays their significance. She pointed at how some of the most damning allegations about Greenway came from the department’s one disgraced officer, Bryan Cutright.

“Cutright was terminated for alleged misconduct, being untruthful,” she said, “then all of a sudden he’s truthful enough to be in the Band report? Like, that seems kind of weird to me.”

And Band never interviewed Massey to get her perspective.

Massey told The Western Edge that she doesn’t think she should recuse herself in decisions around policing, despite her alignment with Greenway’s goals in 2024, her connection to the union president and his wife, and her husband working for the department.

“I don’t feel like I need to recuse myself because I don’t feel that there’s anything that I have done that is improper, unethical or incorrect,” she said. “Why would I let this small group of individuals that I feel has created a narrative on their own personal reasons — why would then, all of a sudden, I should just recuse myself? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

In the days after the files became public, Massey seemed to be parked in the comments sections of local Facebook pages, responding to citizens with screenshots from the documents. Her biggest detractors shared AI images of Massey dressed like a mobster. One day, she shared AI images of herself: seated at a desk covered with piles of papers and a newspaper reading “POLITICAL HIT PIECE.”

She also took a victory lap on her YouTube podcast, “The Find Out Phase,” which she hosts with her FAFODDS colleagues: her daughter, Brianna Gaston and St Pierre. They sat in front of a gun safe and a background bearing the group’s logo: a figure holding the scales of justice.

“We’re providing the receipts,” Massey said as she read portions of the records aloud, “which I think makes our organization different than just people out there spouting a bunch of bullshit.”

For an hour and 15 minutes, the group read records, talked about Facebook comments and made jokes, pouring even more fuel on the fire of an already divisive situation. Massey laughed with her co-hosts and, at times, appeared not to understand why some St. Helens residents did not share her view of the records.

Brianna Gaston — wife of the police union president — sat quietly through most of the podcast, but then chimed in.

“Shit, I just think it’s because we just dropped this bomb on tourism,” she said, referring to the FAFODDS allegations around the Halloweentown organizers. “So now it’s the police and the wives versus tourism, and we blew the lid off that.”

“It’s main character syndrome,” said St Pierre, referring to their critics while inexplicably dressed in a Where’s Waldo costume. “They all just want to be really involved.”

The next week at city council, in a special session, Massey sat on the dais scrolling through a list of slides about the city budget. One showed a pie chart indicating the percentage of the city general fund given to each department. The police get half of the St Helens pie.17

Afterward, citizens lined up for public comment. Most talked to Massey directly. One was Brady Preheim, the host of a local political radio show.

For three minutes he read from the documents, including the text exchange between Greenway, Cutright and Gaston — the one remaining person in that group chat still employed by the city.

“Tell me how it is that you sit here and you think that’s okay. That someone that has been sworn, they’re telling you they’re going to get rid of the mayor,” Preheim said. “Explain to me how it is this officer continues to be employed by the city of St Helens.”

Massey spoke up: “Mr. Preheim, your time is up, please” she said.

“I think your time is up,” Preheim shot back.

Preheim and Massey, who are next door neighbors in St. Helens, then shouted at each other, both trying to get the last word. Their voices bounced off the walls of the small room.

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Oregon’s second-largest electric utility saw its costs for devastating wildfires in 2020 exceed the $1 billion mark Wednesday.

The notable milestone comes as PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has denied its responsibility for a series of fires started near electrical equipment in the Willamette Valley, the Oregon Coast and Southern Oregon.

On Wednesday, a Multnomah County jury awarded more than $305 million in total damages to more than a dozen people, including children, who had their livelihoods upended by the most devastating wildfire season in Oregon’s recorded history1.

Attorneys for the Oregonians seeking compensation from PacifiCorp declined to comment on the landmark ruling.

The Western Edge has reached out to PacifiCorp for comment.

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Wednesday’s ruling stems from a 2023 trial where jurors found PacifiCorp negligently left its equipment energized ahead of a significant windstorm on Labor Day weekend in 2020, among other failures. When tree branches began to fall during that storm, equipment then sparked or contributed to the Santiam Canyon, Echo Mountain Complex, South Obenchain and 242 wildfires.

Wednesday’s verdict only involved victims from the Santiam Canyon Fire, which torched entire towns, such as Detroit and Gates, that connect the Willamette Valley through the Cascade Mountains to Central Oregon along Highway 22. Residents of the area emotionally testified in the 2023 trial that a wall of flame swept through the area in mere hours, destroying everything they owned. Oregonians at that trial said they felt trapped in the traumatic moment for years as they waited for compensation from the investor-owned utility.

The $1 billion in liability for PacifiCorp may only be the beginning. That compensation has been awarded to roughly 145 plaintiffs, but another 1,500 are still awaiting their day in court as part of a class action lawsuit. Those trials will continue weekly this year (the company owed around $50 million in a verdict last week) and will continue through early 2028. Starting next year, the pace of damages trials will increase to twice weekly in Multnomah County.

PacifiCorp has sought to stop the financial bleeding by appealing the original case against it, arguing that the class action should not have been certified in the first place. That appeal remains ongoing.

The company has, in part, justified its opposition to the court decisions by pointing to an Oregon Department of Forestry report last year that found PacifiCorp wasn’t to blame for the Santiam Canyon Fire. That report placed the blame for the fire on another blaze, the Beachie Creek Fire, which had burned for weeks after lightning ignited it. During the 2023 trial against PacifiCorp, lawyers for the company argued that strong winds threw embers from the Beachie Creek fire and caused spot fires in the Santiam Canyon that would eventually burn hundreds of thousands of acres, raze towns and cost lives.

Costs for PacifiCorp related to the fires have rapidly mounted this year. Earlier this month, the company agreed to pay $575 million to the federal government to settle claims around the 2020 fires in Oregon, as well as two additional fires in California. The U.S. Department of Justice asserted in its lawsuit that the company was responsible for all six fires and cost the government substantially to fight those blazes.

PacifiCorp’s stock price faltered in the years immediately following the Oregon verdict ascribing its liability for the fires, but has rebounded over the past year. Earlier this month, the company agreed to a $1.9 billion deal to sell its Washington state assets to Portland General Electric. The deal, according to the Portland Business Journal, was the largest utility sale in Oregon since Berkshire Hathaway purchased PacifiCorp two decades earlier and will improve the company’s cashflow.

The thing you have to know about Kyle Hedquist — because it’s the thing everyone knows about Kyle Hedquist — is that in November 1994, at age 18, he shot a woman in the back of the head.

Hedquist was a senior at Roseburg High School then. He robbed his aunt’s house, and held a local Pizza Hut employee at gunpoint until he handed over money from the safe.

Then he killed 19-year-old Nikki Thrasher, afraid she would tell the police about his crimes. He left her body on a gravel road in the woods, and later a horseback rider found her.

There was no manhunt, no lies, no trial: Hedquist fessed up to everything and, just short of a year after Thrasher’s killing, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He would live the rest of his days behind the walls of Oregon State Penitentiary.

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Twenty-seven years later, in 2022, Hedquist drew the attention of then-Gov. Kate Brown, who reviewed the ways he’d spent his life in prison: volunteering with prisoners in hospice, mentoring other inmates on how to write a resume, taking seminary classes and speaking to at-risk students at Roseburg High School about where his life had gone wrong. At 45, Brown granted him clemency.1

“Mr. Hedquist,” Brown wrote in a report to lawmakers on her decision, “engaged in rehabilitative programming on a level rarely seen by other adults in custody, proactively prepared himself for re-entry into the community … His continued incarceration does not serve the best interests of the State of Oregon.”

When Hedquist walked out of prison, everyone knew he was a murderer. Newspapers and TV stations ran stories about his clemency. Thrasher’s mother told a television station she was unaware he’d been released. Politicians slammed Brown, even some in her own party, for taking mercy on a killer.

Eventually, the headlines died down. Years passed. Hedquist got a job. He got married. He spent his free time volunteering with the elderly, picking up trash around Salem and signing up for community boards.

It felt like Oregon’s capital city opened its arms to him.

In 2024, Salem’s city council unanimously appointed Hedquist to a spot on the Community Police Review Board, or CPRB, a volunteer citizen panel that reviews complaints about police brought by residents. In early December 2025, city leaders reappointed him to the board for another term.

But days later, something changed.

The city’s embrace of Hedquist abruptly ended.

On Dec. 18, thousands of citizens across Salem received a text message. It looked like an emergency alert. “Action needed!! Your Salem city councilor created a mess by putting a convicted aggravated murderer on Salem’s Community Police Review Board. The council had no vetting process, then reaffirmed the same murderer a second time even after they learned his background,” it read.

The message, paid for by the local police and fire unions, urged citizens to pressure their city councilors to revoke Hedquist’s new term, and boot him from the police board.

Weeks later, on Jan. 7, Hedquist — bald, with glasses — wore a gray suit jacket and purple tie as he stood at the microphone in front of the Salem City Council. He had just 3 minutes to speak.

“I stand here a member in good standing, checked every box, met every requirement, fulfilled every voluntary duty. Yet, mysteriously, I became the ghost in your machine,” he said, choking up, his voice strained and rising.

“For 11,364 days, I have carried the weight of the worst decision of my life,” he said. “There is not a day that has gone by in my life that I have not thought about the actions that brought me to prison. I replay the details. I search for a way back to my own humanity through the wreckage of that singular moment. The death of Nikki Thrasher is the gravity that pulls at everything I do. I ended her life and I am forced to live with the agonizing math of that reality: I can never give enough, serve enough or do enough to equal the life that I took. That debt is unpayable.”

A long line of Salem residents waited to say what they thought of Hedquist, his guilt, his innocence, the quality of his character. There were people he knew, people he didn’t. It was less a council meeting than a public trial.

“A man that takes a life, his life shall be taken,” said one man in an American flag shirt with a cross. A woman wearing a shirt that said PSALMS 118:6 - “The LORD is on my side” - shook her head in contempt at the councilors.2

“AIC Hedquist should not be here crying, and he should not be here screaming,” said Elizabeth Infante, who served alongside Hedquist on the board in 2024. “If I was him … I would have came out to the community, gone into the woods and lived my life out.”

Several people voiced their support of Hedquist. “If someone has paid their debt to society and spent decades living differently, when do we allow them back into full participation?” one woman asked. “If the answer is never, then we are closing a door that even God does not close.”

The city councilors who had in the past embraced Hedquist’s volunteerism appeared aghast at his extremely well-known record and listened silently as the community excoriated him. That night the council voted to remove him from the CPRB.

What wasn’t made clear to the public was that this was a manufactured crisis. A Western Edge investigation found that as Salem squabbled about Hedquist, closed-door deals were being made and a bare-knuckled pressure campaign was being waged by the local police union to influence officer oversight.

When the Salem Police union triggered this crisis, the darkest parts of the city rose to the surface. People made racist remarks and sent death threats to council members. A news outlet created an AI slop video about Hedquist that spread on social media. People wrote in comment sections that he deserved to be murdered.

“I think people struggle with redemption and mercy and justice,” Hedquist said in an interview. “I spent 28 years in prison. Maybe that’s not enough in your eyes.”

Scotty Nowning sees the worst side of humanity in his job at the Salem Police Department. As a detective in the special victim’s unit for the past decade, he investigates child sex abuse, rape and sexual assault. It’s a job that’s taught him a lesson on how to do his other job as union president for Salem’s rank-and-file officers: “Not getting too emotionally attached to people’s tough situations,” he said in an interview over coffee in late January.

Like Hedquist, Nowning is bald, and wears glasses and suits. “In 1994, he killed Nicki Thrasher. In 1994, I went to the police academy in Tucson, Arizona,” he said. “Every day since, I was a police officer.”

Nowning has a problem with a murderer being trusted with any oversight over the police. From his perspective, the CPRB is in a position to make judgements on how local police do their jobs. “He pops out of prison and within a year, he’s going to be like, ‘I’m going to go ahead and judge you on how you’re doing that job.’ And I’m like, ‘Based on what?’ Based on what life experience?”

The CPRB — comprised of seven citizens — functions in an entirely advisory role to the Salem police. If city residents lodge complaints against police officers, but are unsatisfied after internal investigations, they can then bring their complaint to the CPRB. The board, which did not meet at all in 2025, reviews the complaint and offers suggestions to the police. The police can take or leave what they say: If the chief decides his officers do not need discipline, the citizen board has no recourse.

This modicum of oversight only exists because the community demanded it 30 years ago.

In the summer of 1996, 63-year-old Salvador Hernandez was in his kitchen when Salem police officers burst through the front door of his home and shot him to death. They were searching for someone they believed was trafficking heroin across the U.S.-Mexico border. After the shooting, the involved officers portrayed the elderly farmworker as a potential killer who lunged at them with a knife; his family members who were in the home at the time said Hernandez was only making breakfast. An all-white grand jury in Salem quickly cleared the officers.

People were outraged, and protesters gathered at Willamette University with banners demanding to “hold police accountable.” After five years of contentious debate over what police oversight should look like, in 2001, the board formed. According to newspaper reports, the police union president at that time derisively called the CPRB “an attempt to appease the minority community.”

Applying to volunteer on the board is simple: people fill out an application, and, if appointed, go on a ride along with police. In 2024, Hedquist completed those steps, noting on his application that he had 28 years of experience with the justice system and served as president of the “Lifer’s Club,” a prisoner-led group to help people with life sentences overcome despair.

He was voted onto the CPRB with little fanfare. The council made no comment on his past crimes, no mention of the headlines lambasting Gov. Brown for releasing him, no discussion of a sprawling profile about Hedquist’s consulting work with lawmakers in the Oregon State Capitol that ran in The Oregonian.

Signs emerged last summer that the city’s feelings about Hedquist were shifting. At a meeting that drew almost no attention, some city council members deliberated if CPRB members should also undergo a criminal background check. By fall, Hedquist — whose term would expire in early 2026 — agreed to what he was told was a routine check. He failed it.3

That’s when Scotty Nowning heard about Hedquist, which “raised the red flag.”

At first, Nowning described practical concerns: He didn’t want a convicted murderer learning how police do their jobs. “Should we be training this person on police tactics? Should we be having him ride in police cars with police officers and saying, ‘Hey, this is how they do what they do?’” he said. Nowning reached out to a city human resources director, who assured him CPRB members learned no tactics, that all training materials given to members are public information and that Hedquist had never received “confidential information” during the year-plus he’d already served on the board.

Then, Nowning’s concerns became more philosophical: Should all citizens — even ones who have committed murder — have a say in police oversight?

Three decades after Salem residents demanded citizen oversight, Nowning sought to influence which residents could get that power. “Just because someone hired him and he’s over at the Capitol dressing nice and whatever, it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said.

He believed that when Salem’s city councilors learned of Hedquist’s criminal background, they, too, would agree he didn’t belong on CPRB.

“I literally thought once we found this out, it was going to be a 9-0 vote,” he said.

It was not.

In December, city councilors voted 5-4 to keep Hedquist on the board, and to also allow him to serve on other city boards.

Nowning and his unionized officers were enraged. They wanted Hedquist gone, and top police brass did as well, according to emails.

Nowning quickly sent off a letter to city council, but he didn’t stop there. He hired Rushlight Agency, a marketing firm, to create a plan of attack. Nowning and the head of the Salem firefighters union, Matt Brozovich, then dumped a combined $8,750 into a media blitz to pressure the city council to change their minds about Hedquist.4

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When the text message vibrated thousands of phones across Salem, it included a link to a website.

Hedquist and his wife, Kate Strathdee, were sitting on the couch watching TV when Strathdee’s phone buzzed. It was a text from a friend: “Are you guys OK?” it read, and linked to the website.

Like people across the city, they clicked. There was Hedquist’s face, the words cold-blooded killer.

The website warned that Hedquist’s volunteer roles with the city gave him the power to hire, promote and fire unionized public safety employees.5 People needed to act, and give the city council a piece of their mind.

People wrote to city leaders. Some defended Hedquist, saying he needed a second chance. Most included some version of the phrase, “I believe in second chances. However...”

Two people who knew Thrasher in high school and now live in Salem opposed him being on the board.

“He has been given a second chance that Nikki Thrasher will never be given. I do believe that allowing Mr. Hedquist to serve in any position of power or oversight would be disrespectful to Nikki Thrasher’s memory, her family, and our community,” one wrote.

Others who had no connection to Thrasher teemed with righteous anger.

“You pieces of human shit having a FUCKING MURDERER who executed a 19 year old girl on the Oversight board are EVIL … Hope you all get cancer and suffer then burn in Hell, like your scumbag buddy murderer,” one constituent wrote.

Tabloid headlines weren’t far behind: The New York Post, Fox News, The Gateway Pundit. The Daily Mail yelled: “Woke Oregon city hires MURDERER who executed teenage girl to its police review board.”

By Christmas morning, Hedquist and Strathdee were receiving death threats. They started to look over their shoulders wherever they went.

Then came the AI slop video.

The owner of the Salem Business Journal is named Jesse Peone. He has an MBA, an economics degree and touts his “experience with ligislation” (sic) on his website’s biography page. On Dec. 30, he posted a video to Instagram and Facebook.

“A convicted murderer was just appointed to the police review board,” Peone said into a tiny microphone.

Unlike ethical crime journalism, which would require a review of public records and interviews to learn the context around Hedquist’s crime, Peone narrated over a series of AI-generated images reenacting Nikki Thrasher’s killing, inventing whole scenes to shock his audience.

The Salem Business Journal’s AI slop video shows Hedquist as a bearded adult man; Hedquist was 18 in 1994. In the video, Thrasher is depicted as a smiling young, blond white woman dressed in a sunny, yellow 1950s housedress with a Peter Pan collar, then lying dead in a muddy ditch. In fact, Thrasher was Korean-American.

“I believe in forgiveness and in second chances, in a lot of cases,” Peone said at the end of the video. “This is not one of them.”

Hedquist felt like he was under a microscope. “People do recognize me in public now, they will call me out,” he said. “People will holler my name out in parking lots. It’s like, ‘Oh, OK. Let’s just get to the car.’”

As his uneasiness grew, and as citizens squabbled, Salem’s two city councilors of color — Mai Vang and Irvin Brown — reported receiving death threats over their votes of support for Hedquist. Slurs trickled into their DMs on social media. Angry people called some councilors’ day jobs, demanding they be fired.

Behind the scenes, money flowed from the police and fire unions to city council members who backed them.

The Salem Police Employees Union, led by Nowning, gave $1,500 to Mayor Julie Hoy’s re-election campaign in early December, according to campaign finance records. In January, just after the council removed Hedquist, the firefighters union sent another $5,000 to Hoy and $2,500 to Councilor Deanna Gwyn. Brozovich, the head of the firefighters union, denied the campaign contributions had anything to do with removing Hedquist. Hoy did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Gwyn did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Councilors who had previously supported Hedquist being on the CPRB began to have second thoughts, too. Within days of the text messages, city councilors capitulated to the police union demands, according to emails obtained through public records requests.

In an email sent the day after Christmas to the fire and police union presidents, Councilor Vanessa Nordyke — who is challenging Hoy in this year’s mayor’s race — said: “This vote was a big mistake on my part.” She requested the men keep the contents of her email a secret from Hoy and the other councilors, appearing concerned about collusion and public meetings law. She then asked if they approved of her proposed changes to the police oversight board. Those included mandatory background checks for the board, banning some people with misdemeanors and making a police ride along the first step in even applying to the CPRB.

Nowning said the council went above and beyond to satisfy him. “They probably fixed it more than I was even asking.”

As Nordyke was bowing to union pressure, and Hoy was accepting donations, Councilors Mai Vang and Irvin Brown stuck to their belief that Hedquist deserved a second chance.

“It’s not as if he was hiding this, pulling a fast one,” Vang said in an interview. “A healthy community should be able to integrate (formerly incarcerated people) into being a positive member of the community. That was my thinking.”

In exchange for that belief, Vang saw waves of threats and slurs come into her re-election campaign and social media accounts. It was only at that point she realized the larger campaign against Hedquist, and anyone who supported him, was underway.

When he spoke at the January public meeting to remove Hedquist, Brown would point out the farce unfolding at city hall as he saw it.

“So just for clarity, I want to say out loud what some folks may be thinking,” he said. “We want to discredit someone from serving or volunteering because they are a felon.”

“I just find it funny, Madam Mayor, that we want to not have someone with a felony serve when we have a commander-in-chief who has 34.”

“Thank you, Councilor Brown,” Hoy said abruptly.

In prison, Hedquist became a volunteer. Inside the walls of Oregon State Penitentiary, he spent time cleaning and feeding prisoners in hospice.6

One year, he successfully lobbied prison leaders to build a playground for children to make the visitors area more welcoming to families. He has no children of his own, but he could see how building something like this would improve everyone’s life: People realized if they stayed on their best behavior, they would get to see their kids during visits, watch them play on that playground.

“It impacts a lot,” Hedquist said. “Now people are like, ‘oh, cool, when’s the next family event? …Like, ‘I want to see my kids next month. I’m not going to fight that dude. I’m not going to yell at that guard.’”

After the playground went up, Hedquist felt inspired to do more. “It was a feeling that this could be a life inside,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be just misery.”

He founded a Toastmasters club, facilitated work training and resume writing classes and assisted Black inmate groups organizing culturally specific events.

All of it would eventually factor into his release.

When Hedquist received clemency from Gov. Brown in 2022, it was hardly unprecedented. Since Oregon’s constitution was written in 1857, the governor has always had pardon power. Even in the state’s earliest years, people convicted of brutal crimes were given second chances. Gov. Sylvester Pennoyer, who served from 1887 to 1895, pardoned 18 people who had been convicted of murder, attempted murder and manslaughter.

For much of America’s history, executive leaders nationwide viewed the justice system as a two-way street. Presidents since the United States’ founding regularly used clemency powers, issuing more than 10,000 remediations in sentences between 1885 and 1930, according to a 2019 law review by Lewis & Clark law professor Aliza Kaplan and attorney Venetia Mayhew, who worked directly on Hedquist’s clemency case.7

While there has never been a concerted effort to curb the Oregon governor’s singular pardon power, over time state governors became increasingly reluctant to use it.

Kaplan and Mayhew argue that police and prosecutors leveraged rising crime rates to gain a type of political power they had not had in previous decades. If a governor felt an urge to use their clemency powers to address an injustice - the death penalty, racial disparities, youth incarceration - law enforcement might label that governor as “weak on crime” and extract a political cost by drumming up public safety fears.

Brown, in her last years as governor, bucked that threat when she released thousands of people from Oregon’s prisons in the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic – including Hedquist.8 The former governor declined to comment for this story.

“Gov. Brown did a lot of clemency in comparison to every governor before her in Oregon,” Kaplan said. “In the end, more than any governor in the history of governors.”

Kaplan describes Hedquist’s case as a “turning point” in clemency in Oregon. To her, the scale of effort to remove a single man from a largely toothless oversight board makes sense as a part of the continued backlash to the sweeping clemency effort.

Gov. Brown’s decision to allow formerly incarcerated people to return to society, and in Hedquist’s case to participate in public life, has stuck in the craw of the Marion County district attorney and local law enforcement. Salem seemed to be sending a message that formerly incarcerated people have no place there.

But the city has always been a prison town. Historical records show that since the first walls of the state penitentiary went up in 1866, Oregon’s capital was built by people who had been locked up for crimes. Prisoners harvested the bounty of the Willamette Valley, producing flax for textiles and running a dairy that put milk in the bellies of Salem’s school children. Inmates cut lumber from surrounding forests. They poured molten metal in the prison’s foundry to make wood furnaces that warmed local homes, and made the very bricks that built Salem’s city hall.

In the flurry of media around Hedquist’s clemency, and then his re-appointment to the police review board, local District Attorney Paige Clarkson went to the news. During this latest round of press, she told KOIN News she, too, believes people can change, but insisted a line must be drawn for victim families.9 “We wouldn’t put a bank robber as the president of another bank,” she said. “We wouldn’t give a child molester the ability to run a daycare.”

Hedquist was neither trying to run a bank, nor a daycare. He was trying to volunteer.

All of his volunteer work with seniors, the homeless shelters and his roles on both the fire and police boards halted because of the public backlash.

In prison, he believed that if he was ever given another chance to be a free man, he would carry the lessons he learned in prison out into the world. He would be a better person. But the message he received from Salem seemed to be the opposite. “It’s very conflicting,” he said. “It’s like, do you want more of that or less of that? Because you’re sending me some wrong messages here.”

By the time Salem’s City Council met Jan. 7 to reconsider Hedquist’s seat on the board, the majority of councilors had already made up their minds to get rid of him, according to emails reviewed by The Western Edge. In fact, so many conversations had happened behind closed doors that one councilor walked out of the meeting before it started, fearing city leaders had violated public meeting or ethics laws.10

“In my opinion, tonight’s meeting has become a circus because of behind the scenes discussions and input from people who want to make it a spectacle so they can get into the news under a false narrative,” Micki Varney said before she strolled out. (Varney did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment.)

By the end of the meeting, all but two councilors — Brown and Vang — decided to strip Hedquist from his CPRB and fire board positions and put rules in place that would ban him, or anyone with certain felonies on their record, from being on a public safety board. Councilor Deanna Gwyn performatively held up a photo of Thrasher, and read from an anonymous letter supposedly sent to the council by a friend of Thrasher.11

In the end, Hedquist lost everything: his position volunteering at a Salem homeless shelter, his volunteer position helping at the city’s senior center, his job advocating for criminal justice reforms at the state Capitol. (When reached for comment, his employer described his lay off as coincidental and unrelated to the controversy.)

“People who are convicted of crimes, it never ends,” Kaplan, the law professor, said reflecting on Salem’s police board drama. “Society’s judgement. Whether Kyle spent 28 years or 40 years, it would never end.”

Hedquist thinks that when he left prison, he tried to be the most honest person he could be. He knows murderers who served their sentences and quickly changed their names because of fear that society would never accept them. He wonders if he should have done that, too.

Still, he did not expect to be chewed up by a city he had spent his post-prison life trying to make cleaner and safer through volunteering. Without all the civic activities to fill his day, Hedquist found comfort tinkering with the lights in tiny holiday displays at home. He had no control over the light switches in prison, and proudly showed off a particularly hard to wire display of miniature ice skaters to a reporter.

“It’s just this weird back and forth. Like, we want to be progressive. We want to be a city of second chances, but just not for everyone,” Hedquist said. “I felt bad for the city. … What people in authority were saying just wasn’t true.”

He likened the drama to “backdoor conversations” he saw frequently in prison when rival factions would make plays for control of the yard.

“I know (Scotty Nowning’s) an officer, but in my eyes I saw him as a gang leader and he was posturing with another gang, the Salem City Council,” he said. “And this gang is dominant now. The way it would work in prison is once that happens, that dominant gang is in charge.”

He felt caught in the middle of a turf war the police union won.

Where Hedquist would once chat with his neighbors after he mowed their lawns, he now finds closed doors. Where he once viewed the Salem police as reliable friends he could call if he saw a person in mental health crisis, he now worries officers are following him.

He and his wife, Kate Strathdee, have considered moving out of Salem, fearing further retribution.

Strathdee believes the public campaign against Hedquist had very little to do with the police review board itself. In her mind, the police union flexed its power within the city and elected officials sacrificed her husband because it is a contentious political season.

Meanwhile, she wonders what was gained for Salem, the prison town where people leave incarceration every day.

“Kyle is like the best of the best of people who have come out of incarceration,” she said. “If they deny him a position of volunteerism, what does that tell everyone else who is trying to recover?

“It says if he’s not good enough, no one will ever be good enough,” she said.

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In this final entry in the introductory series launching The Western Edge, we wanted to lay out some of the work Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas have done over the past decade as a sampler of our ethos in this work and what’s to come. Next week, we’ll be delivering our first story, which we’re incredibly excited to put before you because writing about ourselves is about as dreadful as it gets.

Separately and together, we have a long track record of producing deep-dive investigative journalism rooted in western United States. This type of work gets us up in the morning, and The Western Edge is the next chapter of our collaboration.

We have an ask: If you have listened to one of these projects above and enjoyed it, consider supporting The Western Edge with a paid subscription. Investigative journalism takes time and money to produce. Gathering tape, getting public records and tracking down people who don’t want to be found — the work that goes beyond reading a press release and scrolling social media — is becoming a lost art in journalism. Help us preserve it!

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Our collaboration began with the podcast Bundyville. The first season of the longform story series, published by Longreads in 2018, was adapted into a podcast with the support of Oregon Public Broadcasting. The project examined the deeper story behind the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the winter of 2016. While the 41-day affair drew the interest of local, national and international media, there was much more to it than what reporters initially captured. Bundyville is a document of the religious motivations that inspired the Bundy family to lead standoffs with the government in both Oregon and Nevada, and where God was telling them to go next. This series was a finalist for the American Society of Magazine Editors’ prestigious National Magazine Award for Best Podcast, and The Ringer deemed it “The Podcast that Explains Trump’s America.”

But the story was so much bigger than we could have imagined. Some reporters might have called it good and moved on then. But we like to dig. In 2019, we continued reporting on the Patriot movement, and how its tendrils reached across the West. The second season of Bundyville, called The Remnant, examines the ripple effects of the Bundys’ occupations, and the people they inspired. There’s a bombing in a small Nevada desert town, a would-be bomber in Utah, Christian nationalist lawmakers in Eastern Washington and a separatist community near the Canadian border. The project was again recognized by ASME in 2020.

From there, Haas went on to produce a series for Sony and OPB called Dying for a Fight. Many who attended political protests in Portland, Oregon, between 2015 and 2019 had seen 23-year-old Sean Kealiher. The prominent anti-fascist made fiery speeches and had no qualms about going nose-to-nose with police, as well as the long line of far-right groups who’d chosen to pick fights in his hometown. When someone killed Kealiher in 2019, questions remained over what actually happened and what Portland police really knew. Dying for a Fight viewed Kealiher’s life through the lens of his grieving mother, and told the story of his political worldview. The project led Haas, reporters Sergio Olmos and Jonathan Levinson, producer Grant Irving and a small team of collaborators showed what happened out of frame of viral Twitter videos and pressed police for answers. Eventually, they solved who killed Kealiher.

Meanwhile, Sottile collaborated with BBC producer Georgia Catt on two podcasts. Two Minutes Past Nine, released in 2020, was a 25-year retrospective on the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, which killed 168 civilians. The series sought to understand how extremist ideas inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit the bombing, and how those ideas had become progressively more mainstream in American politics. In 2023, Sottile and Catt teamed up again for Burn Wild, an investigation of the Earth Liberation Front. Often branded as environmental extremists, Sottile and Catt become curious if that label holds up when the world is literally burning. Sottile also authored two books documenting American extremism: When the Moon Turns to Blood and Blazing Eye Sees All.

We reunited as a reporting duo in 2024 on a story we started scratching at five years before: the wrongful incarceration and death row conviction of Jesse Lee Johnson. That story eventually became the first season of Hush, an ambitious project to investigate overlooked stories in the Northwest’s news deserts. Johnson, a Black man from Arkansas, had come to Oregon in the 1990s on a whim to see the ocean. A chance encounter in the state’s capital city, Salem, would find him targeted by biased police detectives, immovable prosecutors and a justice system bent on killing him. Our reporting helped free Johnson and set the record straight on his quarter century behind bars.

Season two of Hush investigated the 2019 death of Sarah Zuber in rural Columbia County, Oregon. Zuber had died just 400 feet from her family’s front door, but no one had a clue years later what actually happened to her. That confusion, as we’d find through thousands of hours of reporting, was due to unexplainable errors by the medical examiner, infighting among local law enforcement and waves of political subterfuge roiling the county. The result was a family who felt bruised and abandoned by what they had previously believed to be a close-knit, idyllic slice of Oregon.

Recently, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard made an entire podcast episode about our approach to journalism, how we keep ethics front and center at all times in our work, and how that helps us navigate difficult storytelling.

The Western Edge emerged out of the demise of Hush. We believe to best tell the story of the West, journalists need to spend time in its hidden corners, talking to people most affected by the powers that shape our region.

We are a small team, but we don’t mind getting into the muck. Digging is what we do. We know how to ask the right questions and how to tell a damn good story. The Western Edge aims to be the type of journalism our region needs - work that’s rooted here and isn’t chasing clicks on Facebook.

When you see us in your inbox, it will be worth your time.

If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, it may come as a surprise that I’ve never once thought of quitting journalism. I’m always bitching about something with this business: low pay, late pay, no pay; helicopter journalism, missed opportunities, a lack of trust.

I complain because I care. Journalism has been in my life for my entire life. My dad worked in TV news; I edited the college paper, started my own paper and have been working in the field since 2003. It’s what I do.

But it seems like every day I draw breath, the media industry creates new ways to push journalists to quit. If you have a staff job, you’re likely in a union begging for a living wage from an executive who makes triple or quadruple what you do. Or the place you work has laid most people off, or folded, or the well-paid executives have decided journalism is just too risky and what they want is content.

Or maybe you’re just starting out, and you have no mentor to show you how to do the job. Or you can’t get a job, so you give up before you start. Or you covered elections, then COVID, a round of mass protests, another election, more protests, then the ripple effects of what happens when Americans invite fascists over the threshold like vampires. You look at your paycheck and say, “You know what? Fuck this.”

For a long time, I thought I could control how much all of this affected me by being an independent journalist. I set my own terms, draw my own lines, work at my own pace. Nobody can lay me off. I choose what I cover. If I feel traumatized, it’s probably my own fault. If a place pays late, or sucks to work for, I don’t have to write for them anymore.

Last month, I published a manifesto for how I’ll operate going forward in journalism. I felt like I had to because, quite suddenly, at the end of 2025, I stood at the edge of my own career and wasn’t sure what was going to happen to it.

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Back up to 2013. My longtime office job in journalism was at an alternative weekly in Spokane, Washington. I was a staff writer and music editor, but anyone who has worked at an alt-weekly knows everyone does everything. I wrote investigations, weird profiles, every kind of review you can imagine. I edited and commissioned freelancers, started an 80+ band music festival that I ran on top of all of my reporting. I’ve matured to the point where I can finally say this was a wildly low-paid, emotionally-taxing, character-building time in my life, and I am so happy I did it.

This kind of newspaper appealed to a person like me: The entire premise of any respectable alt-weekly newspaper is fundamental skepticism of mainstream media. By working there, I was automatically acknowledging that journalistic institutions are flawed, and don’t serve all readers.

So you could argue I was broken from the start. I never aspired for a beat reporting job at a daily paper, never aimed to be in a press club, never wanted to learn what business casual was. Mainstream journalism rarely reflects worlds I have access to. And to claim a complete lack of bias is, in some ways, mythology. At least alt-weeklies were honest about that.

Working at an alt-weekly gave me a taste of what being independent meant, but it still came with obligations. It got old having to fill the paper week in, week out, and I wanted to concentrate on bigger stories.

Everyone around me thought I was nuts when I made the leap to become a full-time freelance journalist in 2013. No regular pay? No benefits? I would shrug. Even with a job, I had red utility shut-off notices on my door, a repo’d car. It’s not like I was leaving stability behind. If I hustled as a freelancer, at least that hustle would be for my own benefit.

My goals were bigger, more philosophical: I wanted to translate my home of the Pacific Northwest to the larger world. It’s a beautiful, dramatic region, not just in its landscapes, but its history, people and politics. My goal was to make the region better through telling stories — good reads, tough reads, stories people wouldn’t forget. I’ve done that, and it continues to drive my work.

Along the way, I started to believe in myself. I wrote to freelancers I admired and asked how they got the confidence to charge more money; they said telling myself a story I didn’t deserve a living wage was just that: a story.

My price went up. I realized I had to have a lot of projects going to make a real living, so I made podcasts while I wrote a book, put together longform stories while I taught classes, took on a stray lecture while I wrote grant applications.

Ten years into freelancing, in 2023, I broke my own rules.

I had become increasingly frustrated with prestige publications. If journalism is a business of ethics and facts, I could not feel ethically right doing work for national publications that distort facts around poverty, transgender people and, time and time again, the western United States. I was tired of reading stories about how people outside Montana love Yellowstone. I was so sick of seeing the same paragraphs in every story about my hometown, Portland: for a while it was Portlandia-Little Beirut-bicycles-coffee, then after 2020 it became riots-homelessness-drugs-liberals. There seemed to be a total lack of understanding about the Northwest. Pearl-clutching bullshit was passed off as unbiased journalism. I had aspired to write for many of these publications, but they seemed to be filled with line-toeing, power-loving, state violence-normalizing, conventional-thinking reporters who treated my home like it was a child that needed a lecture from an adult.

So I shifted my focus from telling Northwest stories for large media outlets to telling Northwest stories for Northwesterners. I started doing more work as a correspondent for the great western magazine High Country News, where I remain a proud contractor and contributing editor today.

I committed to doing investigative work for Oregon Public Broadcasting through a narrative deep-dive podcast called Hush, which I created with one of my Bundyville collaborators, Ryan Haas. The project seemed like a dream. I maintained my status as an independent reporter, but OPB would give me a steady check and health insurance for taking on such a massive project.

With Hush we created something rare in today’s journalism industry — something unflinching and immersive and full of heart. The first season exposed corruption in Oregon’s capitol city, and how a man named Jesse Johnson was incarcerated on Oregon’s death row for nearly two decades for a crime he didn’t commit. Our work quite literally helped free him from prison.

I pitched another season to OPB, got a green light and knew I had roughly a year to get another season done. I never got another contract, but every month I filed a timesheet showing I was working full time, even though I worked on Hush nights, weekends, every spare moment I had. My life became very hectic: promoting my new book, making Hush, freelancing for HCN. It took more than two decades for my career to finally feel stable. I was busy, but comfortable.

This past year, Haas and I put out our second season of Hush, about a Columbia County, Oregon family whose 18-year-old daughter, Sarah Zuber, died in strange circumstances years prior. The Zuber family was frustrated they had no answer from local investigators. We poured thousands of hours into making the show, exposing the bureaucratic churn that torturously ground down this one family. Proud is the only word I have for this project, but that barely describes it.

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Haas eloquently explains what happened to Hush in his devastating essay, “I Had a Dream Journalism Job. Here’s Why I Quit.” The long and short of it is this: for all of our hard work, OPB canceled the show.

I’m still not sure what happened, why Hush was shelved. What I know is that when the second season was halfway done, I couldn’t seem to get a response from Chief Content Officer Jason Potts about the pitch for the third season of Hush.

In early November, on the same day CEO Rachel Smolkin announced on social media that OPB had closed its federal funding gap of $5 million, Potts finally sent me a three sentence email. Two of those sentences were platitudes, the other was: “We are not moving forward with Season 3 of Hush at this time.”

No one at OPB called me to tell me this news. No meeting to say it to my face. No professionalism. I was being fired, and I still don’t know why. That regular paycheck, that health insurance — it was all gone in one email. I was furious, but most immediately I was angry at myself. Why had I compromised my independence for an organization that couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me why my journalism didn’t matter?

I remember as a kid watching my dad go through layoffs at television stations, the ways it threw our family into disarray, how the whims of media CEOs and CCOs and consultants made us have to pick up and move every two years, start again at a new school, make new friends. The stress rose off him like steam. I’m not far from the age he was when he left the business for good.

I question the ability of any journalist to do our work right now when the boardroom jockeys of the industry, with their mansions and six-figure salaries, seem so intent on killing off reporters, people who barely make rent.

When I think about why I put my independence on the back burner to make Hush, I have a few reasons I can point to: age, fatigue, a desire for something stable. Who can say no to a dream project? I was older, better at doing this work. I thought, finally, someone sees what I can do and is willing to pay for it. I thought I had earned stability, and I was willing to hang up my independence for an organization that wanted me to simply do what I do.

All of this reminded me of the cruel reality that there is no stable place in media. It made me remember how much value there is in being independent.

I don’t think anyone was trying to get me to quit journalism when they canned Hush. I don’t think they thought about me at all. They didn’t know the person they were wiping off a spreadsheet — me — was someone who cares deeply about this profession, which I would have told them if they’d cared to respond to my emails.

I had a few hard weeks after being canned, but even then, I never thought about quitting. I just had to shuffle around in sweatpants for a few days. It turned out I was never actually at an edge of my career — not really. I was just at a crossroads, one I’d stood at lots of times before, where I just needed to figure out a way to make journalism work for me.

This might sound silly, or obvious, but from time to time, I do have to remind myself that I work for a reason: I want to know how I’ll pay my bills each month. I want, maybe, just once, to say no to the payment plan. I want to have the same doctors for years on end because my health insurance isn’t changing all the time. I want to buy an air conditioner and fix a broken window, and I want to save for retirement, even though I know I’ll always do this work in some way, even when I’m old. I don’t think any of this is too much to ask.

If I can’t work for outlets who really mean it when they say they publish courageous journalism, where executives step aside and allow journalists to show them what courage means, then I will make one myself.

The Western Edge is an attempt to preserve the spirit of Hush. This is a project based on picking up the phone and calling people. It’s grounded in relationship-building in communities across this region. It is centered in a belief that journalism done well can do good in the world, and it’s a project where the stakeholders are readers, not moneyed people buying their way onto boards.

In these dark times, I see journalism as a bright spot in all this fog. It won’t change the world on its own, but it can show the way toward a better future as long as we can keep that light burning.

It’ll be a cold day when I let some executive snuff it out for me.

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The year was 2013 and the collapse of newspapers was apparent to anyone with eyes. Or at least to me, who had just seen their boss unceremoniously hauled out of his office by his soon-to-be corporate replacement.

I was city editor at The World, a newspaper in the coastal town of Coos Bay, Oregon, where I was paid $32,000 a year to edit reporters, assign stories, design pages, write the occasional op-ed, field calls from readers and prioritize the coverage appearing in the paper’s daily news section. My new boss offered me a raise to $36,000 to oversee the full paper and help supervise two weekly publications in nearby communities. I wanted out. Thankfully, I got the call I’d been waiting for: I’d landed a job at Oregon Public Broadcasting, the largest public media organization in the state.

Public media stood apart from what I was used to in print journalism. Rather than relying heavily upon classifieds and advertisers, OPB leans on audience trust as its business core. Paid membership by people in the community, with some governmental support, kept the lights on. And those members take pride in that trust, slapping bumper stickers on their cars and carrying OPB coffee mugs.

When I moved to Portland to start at OPB in 2013 on a grant to build community journalism, I did not initially understand why so many people would donate to the operation. OPB was known for sweeping television programs that showed off Oregon’s natural beauty, but the news team wasn’t much larger than what I had just left in Coos Bay. They didn’t break news often, focusing instead on follow-up stories to the previous day’s headlines in The Oregonian.

My role at OPB was to support small, financially-collapsing newspapers across the state that could no longer afford to fill their pages with regional and local stories. OPB wanted to lead with a new type of journalism – one that prioritized collaboration over competition. It was a positive vision of media that saw an opportunity to better inform Oregonians and rebuild news by sharing OPB’s ample resources with other outlets. That vision resonated with members and donors, and soon OPB hired more reporters to cover the state.

OPB became more serious about original news coverage out of a duty to Oregonians. By covering more stories, we could share more regional coverage with our partners. In turn, more people in our state would get news relevant to their lives instead of more national wire services.

By the time armed militants took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, there was new vigor in the small but growing newsroom. Our reporters stationed at the refuge every day of the 41-day occupation. While national reporters ate up the oppressed cowboy narrative put forth by the occupiers, OPB reporters knew Oregon and didn’t soft pedal what was happening. We revealed how the occupiers destroyed tribal burial sites to make garbage pits and the ways the government’s failure to prosecute the Bundys in 2014, after an armed confrontation on their property in Nevada, led directly to the Oregon occupation. Our reporters worked with other Oregon journalists to produce podcasts, talk shows and documentaries revealing the truth of what happened in remote Harney County.

That was a turning point for OPB and for me. The newsroom grew year-after-year as the organization’s leaders – and inspired donors – invested millions of dollars into journalism that sought to hold power to account without fear or favor. Former Oregonian reporter Anna Griffin joined OPB at that time to lead the newsroom, pushing all of us to live up to the ideals of what journalism is supposed to be: fair, accurate and always seeking accountability.

For the next decade, I helped grow the reputation of OPB’s newsroom by producing and reporting a series of hit podcasts, primarily with my reporting partner, Leah Sottile. I edited and mentored reporters as they strove to uncover societal ills in our jails and the looming drought coming for us all. My work sent a man to prison for a murder he nearly got away with. It uncovered the physical, psychological and constitutional abuses inflicted on regular Oregonians by federal and local police officers during protests in 2020. I effectively cut the legs out from under an AI slop-house positioning itself as a local newspaper so it could profit off the reputations of real journalists.

Contrary to the early part of my career in newspapers, I felt optimistic at OPB. We were changing the state of Oregon for the better. I bought a house. I planned to retire from public media someday, having served my community through my journalism.

I was foolishly comfortable.

In the fall of 2024, OPB’s board hired Rachel Smolkin away from CNN following the retirement of longtime CEO Steve Bass. She came from a strong journalism background, which seemed promising. She was someone who ascended to the heights of a nationally-known outlet. But bringing on a CEO from a corporate journalism background into public media carried risk. I, like many Americans, have often worried about the ways big business shapes the reporting that happens – or doesn’t happen – at corporate media outlets. That’s a concern I never had to wonder about at OPB.

For a long time, I simply shook my head at what I saw happening broadly in media. Sure, the national outlets were debasing themselves in new and surprising ways seemingly daily, but I believed local journalism could be different. OPB had a mission to cover the news in a way that helped society — immune to the mistakes of the wider industry.

I knew OPB was changing when Smolkin sat in front of a room of journalists and told us she saw herself as our new “editor in chief.” I felt immediately on edge about the remark. A CEO’s job in public media is to raise money and court donors, not to dictate news coverage. (Around a year later while speaking to a roomful of newsroom leaders, Smolkin would deny she said this; I’ve confirmed her “editor in chief” comment through a recording of the meeting.)

The concept of an editorial firewall is sacred to journalists: The moneymaking side of media must stay the hell out of the newsroom so the work isn’t tainted. People who have power, once allowed input on an editorial process, will seek to shape it in their favor. In all of my time at OPB, until Smolkin’s arrival, this was never an issue. The CEO and the board never involved themselves in our journalism, as far as I know.

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This premise essentially equates to church and state. To belabor this metaphor, Smolkin is the Pope, and she soon made it clear OPB was now her Vatican. Incursions from the business side began to arise.

In that first year of Smolkin’s management, here’s what her serving as “editor in chief” looked like: story pitches from OPB board members being directed to reporters, editors being told staff did not understand rural Oregon after Smolkin toured the region for the first time to meet with powerbrokers there (many OPB staff, including me, grew up and worked in rural areas for years before coming to Portland), calls on weekends to chase inconsequential stories because another news outlet had published, and board member critiques of coverage filtering down to editorial leaders.

A single event could potentially be excused as new leaders finding their feet at a complex news organization. But after enough times, I couldn’t shake the truth.

The rot that hollowed out trust in corporate media finally reached OPB.

One doesn’t need to look far to find evidence of the ethical decay at news organizations. National media is filled with hucksters who shout about returning journalism to the highest standards while making decisions that betray those honey-dripped words – see Bari Weiss and her handling of CBS. This pandering, “both sides” journalism has left trust in media institutions at an all time low, according to a recent Gallup poll.

My faith in OPB’s ability to deliver on its mission shattered this fall when they informed Sottile and me that the organization would be ending our investigative podcast, Hush. In two seasons, the show had been a massive success by all measures – it helped free a wrongly-accused man who spent 17 years on Oregon’s death row, and it highlighted the cascading bureaucratic failures that derailed the death investigation of a young woman in rural Oregon. Our first season won a National Headliner award and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. The series embodied the highest goals of local journalism, bringing voice to the voiceless through rigorous reporting and demanding powerful people answer for their actions. Sottile and I poured thousands of hours into each season. Hush is journalism I’m incredibly proud of.

And yet, OPB canceled the show for no clear reason. When I asked Chief Content Officer Jason Potts, who was hired under Smolkin, if he had even listened to the show before canceling it, he told me no. When I inquired further about his reasons for ending the project, I only received vague replies about how it did not fit organizational priorities.

Other shows, such as OPB’s food program Superabundant would face similarly vague demises – described as a “pause,” presumably to soften the blow that was ending years of people’s hard work.

Soon, Smolkin would require staff to pivot away from the projects they cultivated out of years of reporting in Oregon to work on her own brainchild: making short-form videos about “creators” in the state. The dreaded “pivot to video” that plagued newspapers in the early days of the internet had reached public media, by my estimation.

All things old are new again.

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I do not claim to know the future of news media. I don’t know what it should look like in our social media-soaked era, our AI era. What I do know is that no technology has changed the core principles of this work: find facts, maintain your ethics at all costs and hold the rich and powerful accountable.

By last December, I had given up my hope that all of this change was temporary at OPB. My good job was not good anymore. My weeks were now spent in meetings doing busywork driven by senior leaders. Much of the rest of my time I spent on trying to protect reporters and editors from orders by Smolkin and Potts to chase stories The Oregonian reported so we could “compete” with them. It felt as if everything I had spent a decade trying to build – the collaborative push to elevate the quality of journalism in Oregon – was unraveled overnight by a corporate news mentality, by people who appeared to me more concerned about optics and competition than speaking truth to power.

Over the past year, I have seen people with decades of experience at OPB leave one after another. This included Griffin, who now works at The New York Times. TV producers who gave their careers to OPB are gone. Marketing, fundraising, finance – almost every department at OPB has seen people head for the doors under this new leadership team. Of course, departure emails have been filled with vague reasons to end long careers: new professional opportunities, early retirements, spending more time with family. I admit, even mine was vague because it just felt easier to leave than to fight anymore. Countless people have asked me if I was forced out. I was not.

But the OPB on your coffee mug, or on your window sticker, might not be the exact place you think it is. It isn’t a place I understand anymore, though many excellent journalists still work there. It is led by people in glass offices who make offensively large salaries1 while reporters barely make a livable wage. Some journalists work an extra job to make up for what OPB doesn’t pay them.

A new job posting punctuated my final day in the office. It advertised for another non-journalism role, a director of operations who could make up to $140,000 a year, far exceeding all but one newsroom salary. A $200,000 vice-president of marketing soon followed, further swelling the top ranks at OPB.

To me, money from the public should be focused on making journalism, not padding executive salaries. For the past year and a half, the reporters, hosts and producers you hear on the radio and read online at OPB have bargained for a first union contract. Their goal is to cement the vision of a media outlet that values journalism and the people who make it. As of this writing, an agreement still hasn’t been reached.

As I enter 2026, I feel hopeful about the future of journalism, despite the personally challenging year I’m leaving behind.

In his essay, “Best ways to support journalism in 2025,” former LA Times national correspondent and current strong press advocate frames the problem I faced at OPB quite simply: “Journalism is a captured industry.” Pearce was referring to the corrosive effects of Big Tech, but I would extend that analysis to include corporate leaders who are wealthy, removed from the front lines of journalism and who pay more attention to other moneyed, powerful people than they do their own reporters2.

Westerners deserve more high quality journalism in 2026, not less. This is why I have joined with Sottile to form The Western Edge. Fearless reporting won’t be up for debate or compromise at The Western Edge, it will be the marching order. It will be a continuation of the ethos we established with Hush, even if the leaders at OPB didn’t see the value in that.

If you believe, like I do, that quality journalism comes from reporters and not from board rooms, I hope you’ll subscribe to The Western Edge. Nearly every dollar we make will go into actual reporting. That’s a promise that I guarantee few media organizations can make.

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