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Content warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.

The 160-acre swath of flowering meadows, clear creeks and dense woods seemed special, like a place where someone really could find enlightenment.

The land outside Veneta, Oregon, was once home to a cowboy theme park where visitors watched scripted gunfights, but by the time Rachel Montgomery arrived at the remote property, the place had calmed into a tranquil Buddhist outpost known as the Dzogchen Retreat Center, or DRC.1

“It’s this beautiful drive and experience to go from Eugene, heading towards the foresty, beachy side of the coast,” Montgomery said. “It’s really remote, really, really rugged, really adventure-feeling to go to an off-grid community.”

Rikkianne Chatfield, a friend she knew from childhood, was working at DRC in 2011 and invited Montgomery out for the Fourth of July. She watched fireworks alongside people dressed in robes. The whole experience was “enchanting,” Montgomery said.

Buddhism was new to her, but its imagery was familiar from hippie scenes and local countercultures: “The way we grow up in the Pacific Northwest, I don’t think any of us are strangers to prayer flags or Buddha statues,” Montgomery said.

She kept coming back, working as a nanny on her breaks from college, taking a class or two. Then, after graduation, she moved to work at DRC full-time.

By the winter of 2013, Montgomery was 21 years old. Her only pay was room and board and one-on-one classes with DRC’s guru, a man named Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche, who all the students simply called Choga.

Montgomery soon took vows of devotion to Choga, who was 49.2 He became her root guru. In Vajrayāna or Tantric Buddhism, an esoteric branch of Tibetan Buddhism taught at DRC, a guru acts as a key to unlocking the wisdom of the scriptures. You “give your mind over to another person. And that one person is the locus of control for your life,” Montgomery explained to The Western Edge. “Some people look their whole lives to find a guru.”

Everything Choga did was a mystery to be examined, every word he spoke contained a lesson. The entire world of the retreat center revolved around him; students made his meals, brought him water during lessons. Choga seemed to take a particular liking to Montgomery, and requested her to sit by his side, where they would talk and sing. People told her how special it was to have his attention.

She began to work for Choga more directly, taking on menial cleaning and organizing tasks he gave her. Sometimes, he would lavish Montgomery with kindness; other times, he made cruel comments about her in front of other students. Over time, he began to ask increasingly more invasive questions about her love life, and her menstrual cycle.

But Montgomery had pledged her devotion to him, and when Choga told her he would give her “spiritual empowerments,” she believed him.

Their student-teacher relationship soon became one of subjugation and control. Beginning in September 2013, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court, Choga organized one-on-one “empowerment” sessions with Montgomery that he said would further her spirituality. On more than one occasion, Montgomery alleged, these sessions would culminate in Choga raping her.

On Dec. 12, 2013, according to the lawsuit, Choga instructed Montgomery to drink excessive amounts of alcohol as a part of a community-wide celebration. She alleged she became so intoxicated that she passed out and woke up on the floor of the retreat center’s Dakini Mandala temple. Her pants and underwear were around her ankles, and she had “recollections of a heavy weight of Choga’s body on top of hers.”

When Montgomery found out she was pregnant a month later, she went to Choga, who “confirmed that he had penetrated her in the temple that night,” and told her their child would be an enlightened being, according to the lawsuit.

Even after the rape, Montgomery believed what her guru said. But she did not want a child; she wanted an abortion, which Choga paid for, and asked Montgomery to take a vow of secrecy. She had the procedure, left the retreat center for good and tried to put it behind her.

But around 2018, conversations around the exact kind of relationship Montgomery was in with her guru started to take place as tidal waves of sexual assault allegations surfaced during the #MeToo movement. People in Buddhist communities began to ask questions. How much consent did students really have when pledging devotion to a guru? And what was appropriate behavior by someone with so much spiritual power?

Today, eight years later, Oregon Buddhist organizations continue to search for answers. In more than one case, female students plunged headlong into spiritual communities they perceived as pure and free from the ills of other religious institutions. They pledged devotion to male gurus believed to have near-deity status.

Later, when things went wrong, each successfully sought accountability through the justice system, and received settlements.

But now, some former students want the wider Buddhist community to take action. In two instances, the men who carried out the alleged harm continue to hold power, teach and have stature.

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What happened to Rachel Montgomery never left her.

In 2021, she made a phone call to the Lane County Sheriff’s Office and told detectives that the guru of Dzogchen Retreat Center had raped her. But when three detectives arrived at the remote retreat center, staff told the officers that Choga had been in Asia since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They “had no idea if or when he ever would return,” according to one detective’s report.

Detectives wrote they planned to suspend the case until Choga came back to the United States, and gave their findings to the Lane County district attorney.

Montgomery, believing she might never see a prosecution, sought a civil lawsuit, which settled in 2025.

Once again, she thought her past with the remote Buddhist retreat was behind her. But Dzogchen Retreat Center quietly added new events to its schedule earlier this year, including a two-day in-person retreat in early June with Choga.

He was back in the country.

****

Sunitha Bhaskaran left her entire life behind to sit at the feet of her guru.

She was 40-years-old and working as an engineer in the Bay Area when she took an interest in Buddhist philosophy and meditation classes, and signed up for a workshop at a local center run by an organization called the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, or the FPMT.

The teacher was highly-revered, a man named Kesang Tuladhar — known to his students as Yangsi Rinpoche.3 “I was an eager student,” Bhaskaran said in a pair of interviews with The Western Edge.

In 2013, she left her job, drove north to Portland and enrolled as a student at Maitripa College, a Tibetan Buddhist school and affiliate of the FPMT. The two organizations share a nondescript building in Southeast Portland with prayer flags hanging in a window.4

At Maitripa College, Bhaskaran steeped herself in the tight-knit community built around Tuladhar, who acted as president and taught classes. “He identifies people who are very devoted,” she said. Devotion earned her a volunteer teaching assistant position. For two years she worked for $500 a month as a bookkeeper. Later she would transcribe Tuladhar’s lectures as his personal archive coordinator.

Bhaskaran became closer to Tuladhar, and they started going to lunch. “He’ll say things like, ‘I want to take care of you.’ I remember one of the things he said to me, ‘You will be my disciple and I will be your root teacher,’” she recalled. Later, he would text Bhaskaran that he was coming to her house. He gave her gifts, and she would cook for him. On weekends, Tuladhar would call and ask her to care for his child.5

Then, he began to rub his body against hers, kiss her, and then they had sex. Tuladhar described it as a spiritual practice, according to Bhaskaran; she said these frequent encounters would often leave her bleeding and bruised.

All the while, they exchanged text messages that they loved each other. But as time passed, the power dynamics at play and the secrecy around their relationship began to confuse and unsettle Bhaskaran.

By then, those exact sorts of power dynamics were being scrutinized within other North American Buddhist communities. In 2018, the Tibetan Buddhist organization Shambhala International was rocked by a series of harrowing stories of sexual violence published by a grassroots project of survivors called Buddhist Project Sunshine. The project gained international media coverage and resulted in the organization’s leader, Sakhong Mipyam, stepping down.

Around the same time, Sogyal Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher and author of the best-seller The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was accused of beating his students.

When asked about the myriad allegations of abuse and violence, the Dalai Lama admitted to reporters that “someone mentioned about a problem of sexual allegations” to him years before, but he had taken no action; the issue was “nothing new,” he said.

By 2021, those conversations reached Maitripa College.

During a meeting that spring, students peppered Tuladhar with questions. They wanted his advice: How were followers supposed to navigate the relationship with a teacher they had pledged devotion to?

“If I’m sitting here thinking ‘OK, so what Rinpoche is saying is that in order to get enlightened, I have to be his devoted disciple. And if he asks me to have sex with him, I have to say yes in order to get enlightened,” one woman said during the meeting, a recording of which was provided to The Western Edge.

“That’s terrifying for most people,” she explained. “How does someone know or feel safe?”

Tuladhar seemed unable, or unwilling, to speak directly about the issue. For 40 minutes, he and his students talked past each other: He viewed questions about consent as an opportunity to talk about historical practices in Tantric Buddhism. Female students posed and rephrased questions trying to get a clear answer. Was it OK for teachers to have sex with their students? Are there boundaries on devotion?

“Devotions are not literal,” Tuladhar said, finally, offering his most clear answer. “Did I do everything my teacher said? No.”

The entire conversation disturbed Bhaskaran. Only recently had Tuladhar ceased coming to her home expecting sex.

“Slowly I realized there were always red flags,” Bhaskaran said. “This person doesn’t genuinely care. I realized that he was just exploiting me.”

She wondered if her guru was less an enlightened being, and more a mortal man.6

****

A person bestowed with the honorific “rinpoche” — meaning “precious one” — is believed in Tibetan Buddhism to be the living reincarnation of a beloved teacher. Students at Dzogchen Retreat Center believe Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche to be the reincarnation of Gedun Chopel, an early 20th Century Buddhist scholar, and he told stories that he had meditated in a cave for seven years.

Kesang Tuladhar is also believed by his followers to be a reincarnated Buddhist scholar: a story that started when Tuladhar was just a little boy.

In a video from January 1975, a long line of monks followed the 6-year-old Tuladhar up a path toward Kopan Monastery, outside Kathmandu, Nepal. The boy was believed to be the reincarnation of Geshe Ngawang Gendun, a revered Buddhist scholar. That day, he sat on a throne and was given his new name: Yangsi Rinpoche.7

Tuladhar and Choga are a part of a generation of men who brought Buddhism to Europe and the United States, where interest in Eastern religions surged in the late 20th Century.

“In that hippie era, in the 1970s and ’80s, people got interested in Asian religions,” Jan Chozen Bays, the co-abbot at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon, told The Western Edge. “We really believed that a master who came from Japan or Tibet or India was enlightened. And so we should just do and follow whatever they said.”

Over time, as Bays herself transitioned from student to spiritual teacher, she has observed how much power over their lives people allow teachers to have. Students “just opened up like little flowers about everything that was going on in their lives,” she said.

Two scholars — Ann Gleig, a professor of religion and cultural studies at University of Central Florida, and Eckerd College professor of religious studies Amy Langenberg — have taken a particular interest in the specific power held by spiritual teachers, and are co-authoring a book about abuse in North American Buddhist communities.

In one article, the pair explain how Americans have long treated Buddhism as “a spiritual antidote to the materially advanced but soulless West.”

“Within the Western imagination, Buddhism has really been constructed as a good religion,” Gleig told The Western Edge. “It’s a product of what we call Orientalism in our field.”

That “wider Orientalist framework” meant Westerners often think of gurus as idealized figures. Some exploited those preconceived notions.

“Part of the tantric tradition is that you have to trust your teacher, and you have to see your teacher as like a living Buddha,” Langenberg said, instructing on how these power dynamics are often explained. “Your teacher is gonna ask you to do things that on the surface seem really sketchy or unethical. Like you don’t want to do them, or they seem wrong, but it’s a way of helping you to know your own mind and confront your own mental limitations.”

For some people, having that kind of power over others opens a window of opportunity to push the boundaries of what’s ethical, and get away with it.

****

By 2021, Sunitha Bhaskaran was starting to think of her relationship to the Maitripa College president differently.

One night in August 2021, she sent an email to Namdrol Miranda Adams, the school’s Dean of Education.

“As you know that Yangsi Rinpoche and I were in a relationship for 4 plus years. The relationship was of a sexual nature,” she wrote. “I will categorically say that I have felt emotionally abused and disrespected in many many levels.”

A few hours later, Bhaskaran wrote again. “I beg you to stop covering Rinpoche’s actions.”

When Adams responded, she appeared sympathetic.

“I did not know you were in such a relationship with Yangsi Rinpoche during the past years, and I am very sad to hear that you have been hurt. Please rest assured that I have not and never will do anything to ‘cover this up,’ and I will do anything I can to help and support you,” she wrote.

Adams forwarded the emails to the college’s board of directors, and Maitripa hired a third-party investigator to look into whether Tuladhar had violated the college’s policies. Her name is Carol Merchasin.

Merchasin was a career attorney when she heard about the Shambhala case, in 2018, and offered her services as an independent sexual misconduct investigator.

“I was retired. I was doing this pro bono,” she said. Merchasin believed her investigations would reveal ways institutions could prevent harm, and they would make changes. “But that was wrong for a number of reasons.”

Third party investigations of spiritual communities became an entire second career for Merchasin.

Over time, she began to see a pattern in organizations that had a “guru culture:” leaders with extraordinary power crossing unclear lines with students.

In 2021, Maitripa College hired Merchasin to investigate Bhaskaran’s claims; Merchasin’s findings remain private.

After interviewing both Bhaskaran and Tuladhar, according to an executive summary of her investigation compiled by Maitripa College’s Board of Directors, the board “concluded that the parties had indeed been involved in an ‘undisclosed intimate, sexual relationship, a violation of Maitripa College consensual relationship policy.’” The college board also said no one involved had any intention of hurting anyone else.

Tuladhar denied having a sexual relationship with Bhaskaran, and Maitripa College’s board kept him as president.

Still, what happened continued to eat away at Bhaskaran.

“When you are with a spiritual teacher, you automatically trust the person, and you can be vulnerable,” she said. “You don’t exploit that. So I think he failed.”

In April 2025, Portland attorneys Amber Kinney and Whitney Stark mailed a letter to Maitripa College informing it of Bhaskaran’s intent to file a civil complaint in court against Tuladhar for sexual battery, negligence and aiding sexual harassment. The school settled with Bhaskaran in October 2025, before the complaint reached the court. Two Maitripa College board members involved in the investigation, when reached for comment, declined to speak for this story.8

Maitripa College declined an interview with The Western Edge, but emailed a statement.

“Maitripa College takes seriously its obligations to its students, its community, and the broader public,” it said.

“In its 20 years of history, a single direct complaint has been made to Maitripa College regarding Yangsi Rinpoche. When Maitripa became aware of the complaint, we undertook a formal institutional response, which included retaining independent legal counsel and commissioning an independent investigation conducted by an outside investigator. That process identified a policy violation. The College has been working, and continues to work, to implement appropriate institutional responses and accountability measures. This matter was subsequently resolved and settled through a formal mediated process in 2025, and terms acceptable to all parties were reached and documented.”

In late June, Tuladhar’s photo and bio were still listed on the College’s “about” page.

“Yangsi Rinpoche is currently on sabbatical,” it read.

****

Rachel Montgomery had also continued to struggle with what happened to her at Dzogchen Retreat Center.

In 2023, with Choga still out of the country, Montgomery filed her civil lawsuit in federal court against him, the Dzogchen Shri Singha Foundation and several officers on the organization’s board of directors alleging sexual battery, negligence and sex trafficking. Carol Merchasin acted as one of her attorneys.

Merchasin argued that guru devotion puts so much power into one person’s hands to control their students’ lives. And, in the wrong hands, that can undermine the consent that’s necessary for a sexual relationship.

Organizations that rely on “the charismatic leader who is infallible, who must be obeyed, you cannot disagree,” she said. “You have set up a power dynamic that can lead… to a lot of coercion.”

After Montgomery’s lawsuit was publicized in an article by The Daily Beast (with the headline “Guru Accused of Mystical Baby Plot in U.S. Rape Case”), word spread quickly through the tight-knit community.

“I think everybody was in some amount of shock,” recalled Devan Anderson, a board member and former teacher who was a part of the organization for 13 years. “It was literally, like, unbelievable.”9

But behind the scenes, she saw people who wanted to stall any criminal investigation into Choga.

“The [board] officers, and other close students, were basically like, ‘We need to keep you from coming back into the country so you don’t get served with these papers,’” Anderson said.

The lawsuit forced her to think harder about the organization she’d spent so much of her life building. Over time, she and other people who’d helped the organization along for so many years began to say things out loud about DRC that had been previously unspeakable.

What seemed like a retreat center of love and light was, for many, a place of fear. Anderson said for a place that preaches spiritual ideas that would help the whole world, Choga yells at the largely-female population of students, and “rules with an iron fist.”

Carrie Ure also started reckoning with what she had seen over decades of involvement with the organization. Ure was named as a defendant in Montgomery’s civil lawsuit; she told The Western Edge that the moment she was served papers naming her as a defendant was the moment she left the organization. She officially resigned in the fall of 2023. Later, all of the defendants in the case were dismissed.

Ure described Choga as “a showman” with tons of charisma, who lights up every room he enters. But at retreats, his temper would come out.

“I saw him hitting people,” Ure said. When Ure was a new student attending a retreat, she recalled a man asked if Choga would allow the group a bathroom break during a session. In response, the guru started screaming at the man. Ure burst into tears.

Choga called her up to his throne at the front of the room. “He looked at me, pointed his finger at me and he said, ‘If you are afraid of me, I will hunt you down.’”

“That could have been the end for me,” Ure said, thinking back on it. But she said after Choga’s outburst, the students were given a break and they walked around the property together. “A couple of the other students came around me and they said, ‘Now you’re initiated, basically. … He does that because he loves us. He knows what’s best for us. He knows us better than we know ourselves.’”

After news spread of Rachel Montgomery’s lawsuit, Ure said she witnessed Choga lashing out at Chatfield — Montgomery’s childhood friend, who still worked at the retreat center — punishing her in front of other students with hundreds of “prostrations,” similar to a push-up.

“She’d be doing hundreds of them. He’d make her just do it, just keep doing it, while we went on with whatever we were doing,” Ure said. Once, Ure was also in the room when he poured a full pint of beer over Chatfield’s head. Chatfield later joined as a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit against Choga; she did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

When The Western Edge requested an interview with Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche, an attorney responded. “Out of respect for the confidentiality of the parties involved, neither the organization nor its representatives will comment further.”10

That confidentiality did not stop the organization from posting a 3,081-word essay on the retreat center’s website, titled “Decisive Announcement.”11 The organization wrote it had been targeted by an “increasingly volatile social climate and the rise of litigious actions targeting spiritual communities,” and that online disinformation continues to circulate about it.

“In order to protect our organization and Sangha from danger, we paused our public events and activities for more than two years. All this has led to a considerable loss of income for our Foundation and associated organizations,” the statement reads.

“We now officially announce that this case is completely closed and legally resolved.”

Levi McKenny, public information officer for the Lane County Sheriff’s department, confirmed its investigation of Choga, and Montgomery and Chatfield’s accusations, had been forwarded to the district attorney’s office. As for the sheriff’s office, “our case on the matter is suspended,” he said.

When reached by phone, Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa said his office never filed the case because, at the time of the investigation, there was an “insufficiency of evidence.” Parosa said that might have meant the sheriff’s office was unable to interview Choga directly.

“I will definitely put this back on the sheriff’s radar,” he said, when informed of Choga’s reemergence in Oregon.

For her part, Montgomery wasn’t surprised the retreat center welcomed Choga back. She now describes her time at DRC as “a cult Buddhist experience.”

“If Lane County, or the state of Oregon, wasn’t going to make it clear that they were uninterested in having this predator in their community, which you could only do that with criminal prosecution, then that person would feel essentially welcome to come back.”

“I do think they misunderstand the severity of what they’re inviting,” she said.

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In this week’s Notes from the Edge, we talk about how the Patrio…

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Pam Wetmore held the phone to her ear, racking her brain for anything that might explain what happened to her son.

The Amazon employee on the other end of the line was vague. Jim Wetmore, 46, had a “medical incident” while working inside a sprawling warehouse east of Portland. Could Pam think of anything that might have caused it?

“And I thought, ‘OK, having high blood pressure, that’s a pre-existing condition,’” she remembered. “But he was taking medication for it. Keeping it under control.”

Her son hadn’t complained recently about feeling unhealthy outside some back pain, Pam said. The person on the phone thanked her and said they’d call back when they knew which hospital he was being taken to.

It was around 2 p.m. on April 6. By the time she traveled the three miles from her apartment in Troutdale, Oregon, to the Amazon Fulfillment Center known as PDX9, Wetmore was near death.

Surveillance video showed the tall, thin man pushing a stack of yellow plastic totes along the building’s second floor around 1:40 p.m., slowing as he took each step. Wetmore then leaned over the stack before collapsing and hitting his shaved head on the hard floor. Other Amazon employees, who discovered him unconscious around nine minutes later, began administering chest compressions and applied a defibrillator at the instruction of a 911 dispatcher. Paramedics on scene declared him dead at 2:32 p.m.

Inside the building’s lobby, Pam assumed her son was still alive.

She sat there after an employee told her they’d find a supervisor to speak with her; no one returned. Pam sat there as waves of Amazon staff passed by her, exiting the building around 3:45 p.m., having been told during their last break of the day to stop all work and go home. She sat there as two volunteers from a local trauma response nonprofit entered the lobby; later, they would comfort her.1

Pam only stood up and left that lobby when a detective asked to speak to her privately. There, outside the Amazon warehouse on an unusually warm2 April day, the detective said her son was dead.

“At that point, I wasn’t going to leave until they brought him out,” Pam said, tearfully recalling those moments during a late April interview with The Western Edge.

For the Wetmore family, the lack of clarity around the “medical incident” that led to Jim Wetmore’s death has left them feeling frustrated and angry.

“Someone should have come out to inform my mom what was going on,” said Jennifer Wetmore, his older sister. “They’re just ignoring the woman whose son is dying on the floor.”

Amazon has denied that working conditions inside PDX9 played any role in Wetmore’s death, citing safety inspector reports. The company has called his loss a tragedy, offering sympathies and grief resources to the Wetmores and his co-workers.

But for many frontline staff at PDX9 and Wetmore’s family, skepticism remains over Amazon’s explanation. In the past four years, at least two PDX9 workers have died and a third sustained life altering injuries.

As of this publication, medical examiners are waiting for toxicology results before finalizing Wetmore’s death certificate, according to his family. In a statement, Amazon said its conclusions came after “our site safety team was verbally informed by the Oregon OSHA Compliance Officer that, based on their initial findings, they determined this to be a non-work related medical issue, which aligns with the findings of our own internal investigation.”

PDX9 workers have described their jobs as physically demanding and question the company’s conclusions that the warehouse environment did not contribute to Wetmore’s death.

Over the past month, The Western Edge has conducted extensive interviews, analyzed hundreds of pages of public safety records, worker’s compensation cases, injury logs and some of Amazon’s own data to detail the working conditions inside PDX9 and to understand why the Wetmores and many employees continue to ask one question: What actually happened to Jim Wetmore?

PDX9 is a 2.3 million-square-foot warehouse, employing more than 3,000 workers over the course of a year. With a workforce of that size, it’s little surprise that emergency services are sometimes needed at the building.

Medical personnel and police are called to PDX9 around 100 times each year, according to emergency dispatch records from April 2024 through April 2026. In many cases, the calls have been for relatively minor incidents: a car theft, a broken-down vehicle, stomach illnesses, allergic reactions.

But around a third of the time, the calls have involved more serious concerns: a young woman with blood pouring out of her mouth after falling and hitting her head, a 27-year-old with chest pains, a person found passed out on the warehouse floor and barely breathing.

The months leading up to Jim Wetmore’s death in early April held no shortage of scares for staff at PDX9. On Jan. 2, 2026, a 59-year-old woman with a history of heart attacks complained of chest pains. She had already taken two doses of nitroglycerin and some baby aspirin, but her pain only worsened, leading her to sweat as she waited for paramedics.

In March, several more employees worried about their hearts. On March 2, a 25-year-old Amazon associate’s skin turned red as he waited for care for chest pains. Five days later, a 20-year-old taking prescribed hormones worried they were having a reaction when their chest began to hurt. On March 23, a 40-year-old man felt pain in the right side of his chest.

Despite all of those emergency dispatches in the weeks before April 6, some employees have described leaders at PDX9 as unprepared when responding to Jim Wetmore’s collapse, as previously reported by The Western Edge. As Wetmore lay on the floor and staff tried to save him, workers in parts of the building continued to pack orders.3

Amazon said it maintains a ratio of one “first aider” for every 50 employees, and responded appropriately to Wetmore’s collapse.

For many associates, Wetmore’s death simply affirmed their perception that the second-largest private employer in the United States4 views them as replaceable.

“Many of us inside the building are grieving — but also scared. What people don’t see is what conditions are really like day to day. Inside the building, temperatures can get extremely hot,” one employee wrote in a message to The Western Edge. “Associates are often placed in roles or paths that push physical limits and increase risk of injury, especially during night shifts where fewer people are expected to handle more responsibilities.”

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Heat is a known problem inside PDX9.

“It’s 49° and raining outside, why is it so damn hot in the building. Turn off the heat,” one PDX9 employee wrote in April on My Voice, an internal message board for Amazon workers.

“I have confirmed there is no heat turned on in the building,” replied Sarah Fink, a senior operations manager at PDX9 and former Marine Corps officer. “Please refrain from using profanity.”

Two employees who spoke to The Western Edge said they frequently wear shorts and T-shirts to work in winter months to stay cool as they pick and pack items. During summer shifts, they accept their clothes will be sweat-drenched; records show temperatures in parts of the building exceeded 80 degrees in June 2025. Another employee said they will sometimes use voluntary time off to leave shifts early and avoid the hottest parts of the day.5

Noise is another problem.

Twice during the summer of 2025, inspectors with the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division — or OSHA — arrived for planned inspections to assess how hot and loud it was inside the Troutdale warehouse, where white noise reverberates from the 13 miles of conveyor belts snaking through the building.

Safety inspection records obtained by The Western Edge show that after those two inspections, no changes were mandated at the facility. But the inspectors did find noise in some areas was regularly between 75 to 84 decibels6 — the equivalent of a constantly running vacuum cleaner or loud city traffic. At that level, the noise inside PDX9 was just shy of the point where OSHA requires immediate mitigation. But the OSHA inspectors noted they had concerns because Amazon employees typically work 10-hour shifts in that constant noise, meaning their exposure was significant even if it fell slightly below hazard standards for an eight-hour shift.

Safety manager Clayton Wayland told the OSHA inspectors he believed noise had increased in the building because of new machines added to the facility in 2022 and because conveyor belts had aging parts. Inspectors noted that Amazon did warn employees about the noise and provided earplugs, protective headphones and hearing tests. Still, Amazon decided to take safety a step further by hanging roughly 40-foot “sound curtains,” stretching from ceiling to floor to tamp down the racket.

Last summer during their visit, OSHA investigators also noticed that temperatures inside the building was at 82 degrees in some areas with 39% humidity, but said the facility’s air conditioning units were able to cool the building down by the time they finished the inspection.

Employees at PDX9 who spoke to The Western Edge on the condition of anonymity said they believe the sound curtains have made the building even warmer by trapping hot air and restricting air flow.

Amazon has denied that claim; in an April 14 statement the company said “since these curtains were installed in February, the average temperature of the building has decreased.”

Data that measures temperatures for each of the building’s HVAC units, obtained by The Western Edge, tells a different story: The average temperature inside during January and February 2026 was between 72 and 73 degrees. But in March and April, it climbed to 75.

On the unusually warm day Jim Wetmore died, roughly 30% of the HVAC units at PDX9 recorded zone temperatures above 77 degrees. According to sources familiar with internal Amazon systems, the heating and cooling systems are supposed to keep the building between 68 and 77 degrees. On warm days in the summer months, temperature inside PDX9 can often exceed 80 degrees.7

By comparison, the much newer PDX8 facility,8 located in nearby Woodburn, Oregon, did not exceed an average temperature of 75 degrees in July 2025. PDX7, a smaller facility located in Salem, Oregon, had an average below 73 degrees.

In response to questions about the heat data, Amazon said its internal climate data show a decrease in average temperatures “over the last six months,” which would roughly cover November to May. The company did not directly answer why PDX9’s average temperatures were notably higher than similar facilities in Oregon.9

In the aftermath of Wetmore’s death, Oregon OSHA said it has opened a new investigation into PDX9 due to worker complaints. That review remains ongoing, and both OSHA and Amazon declined to comment on the details.

Since at least 2019, investigative reporters, researchers and safety advocates have broadly criticized Amazon specifically, and e-commerce generally, for prioritizing speed over safety inside warehouses. Those critics have reported on injury rates over 40%, on ways Amazon has pitted workers against each other to increase their productivity using a rate system and on allegations that people who complain or try to unionize face retaliation, including job loss.

Amazon has disputed nearly all of these claims, and cites its own tallies of worker injuries, which the company said have declined significantly since 2019.

Depending on the metrics used, injury rates at PDX9 remain high.

Over the past six years, the rate of injuries at the Troutdale facility that resulted in workers missing days or needing to be transferred to other duties has, in fact, fallen from a high of 14.7 in 2019 to 9.9 in 2024, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor. While decreasing this rate by a third is significant, PDX9’s injuries are still more than double the industry average for similar warehouse work.

Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson told The Western Edge the company considers employee safety its “highest priority,” and has invested heavily in the area over the past six years. But the company said it does not use days employees are transferred to light job duties as a measure of “safety culture” because those may only reflect minor injuries. Instead, the company focuses on reducing the amount of days employees completely miss work due to serious injury – and on that front Amazon says it stacks up well against its warehousing peers.

Still, PDX9 has recorded at least two deaths and one near-death incident in the past four years, including Wetmore. Another was a man who fell on the job in October 2023 and sustained a head injury. Days later, he died in a hospital. His family said they felt burned by the company after their worker compensation claim was denied.10

The man who lived through his catastrophic injury is Brad Thompson.

Thompson had reached retirement age by the time he went to work at Amazon in 2018, his fully gray goatee standing out against the black outback hat he liked to wear. He started working at the company to stay active and earn some extra money.

Moving packages at Amazon could be difficult, but Thompson liked many of his co-workers and would often fetch them water when they were sweating on the line. He calls his time at PDX9 “bittersweet.”

“At 70 years old, I could work and I felt good about it, but I didn’t like what I saw that was going on,” he said. “There wasn’t anything I could do about it.”

On Dec. 16, 2024, Thompson was coming up on his fourth year of full-time employment at Amazon and needed the money more than ever. He’d finalized his divorce just two months earlier and his bank account was nearly empty.

That evening, Thompson finished his shift as a tote runner.11 He’d worked in that position for more than a year. Despite his age, he’d pushed stacks of yellow totes up and down the lines of packing stations for five hours, walking around nine miles each shift, according to his pedometer.

After his shift, Thompson told a co-worker he’d give him a ride home. Together, they cut across the parking lot toward Thompson’s truck, but as they approached, Thompson felt himself suddenly falling forward, his tired legs trying to speed ahead and regain his balance. His arms flailed.

“Even to this day, I do not remember tripping,” he said. “I was going down like a B-52 bomber in flames, man. I came down hard.”

Surveillance video of the parking lot shows Thompson’s full weight driving his face into the concrete curb ahead of him.

“I came to and I knew there was something seriously wrong because I couldn’t move,” Thompson said over the phone from his home in Washington state, near the Canadian border. “My buddy, Tim, behind me, he asked me, ‘Hey, you all right, Brad? You OK? And I think he shook my foot. And there’s no movement whatsoever.”

Thompson faded out of consciousness again, only to awaken as paramedics were removing his shirt. The vertebrae that connected his skull to his spinal cord was nearly broken in half.

For more than a week, Thompson stayed in the intensive care unit at the Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland as health care specialists figured out next steps. He remembers waking up to staff tightening a screw for a neck traction device.

“I tell people,” he said, “I had two good things: They found that loose screw and put my head back on straight.”

He spent more than six weeks in the hospital. Staff helped Thompson learn how to walk again and regain partial use of his right arm, but in the many hours between physical therapy he dwelled on the state of his life: divorced, broke and debilitated as medical bills mounted by the hour.

“There were times I was screaming that I wanted to die,” Thompson said, holding back tears. “I couldn’t even write. I couldn’t do anything.”

While in those depths one day, PDX9 safety manager Clayton Wayland appeared in Thompson’s room at his bedside, according to the former Amazon worker. He asked how Thompson was doing, if he was comfortable. Then, he asked if Thompson knew what caused him to fall.

“I told them the best I could,” Thompson recalled. “I couldn’t remember hardly anything.”

On a second visit, the safety manager brought Thompson a strawberry milkshake and continued to offer sympathy for his condition. (Amazon declined to make Wayland or other managers at PDX9 available for an interview.)

On Jan. 2, 2025, Wayland sent a letter to OSHA explaining the conditions surrounding Thompson’s fall. He said it happened because Thompson had walked “outside of a designated pedestrian walkway” and because the ground was wet. He went on to say that even though the parking lot was “well lit and the speedbump is painted for visibility,” Amazon planned to install more lights and repaint all speedbumps by the end of the week.

It was a surprise to Thompson when Amazon rejected his worker’s compensation claim just a few weeks later in early 2025. Amazon said that decision was made by a contractor that handles claims for the company.12

“They just said it didn’t happen in the course and scope of employment. That was what the denial said,” Thompson’s lawyer, Michael Gilbertson, told The Western Edge.

During a court hearing, attorneys representing Amazon revealed their belief that Thompson fell because of a pre-existing medical condition. Several years into his employment at PDX9, doctors fused some vertebrae in Thompson’s neck to relieve nerve pain he had. The procedure had gone as planned and Thompson continued to work in the warehouse. But as the worker’s compensation case proceeded, Amazon brought in a doctor13 who reviewed his medical records to testify that the previous surgery could have zapped the nerve endings in Thompson’s legs and inhibited his ability to walk.

Wayland and other managers testified in court that Thompson had an “abnormal gait” before he fell, according to Gilbertson. Amazon’s lawyer asked him to parade around the courtroom, Thompson said. His ex-wife and several of his friends, including the co-worker who was with him the night he fell, testified that Amazon’s accusations weren’t true. Thompson could push totes for nine miles a night, and walk fine until he fell in PDX9’s parking lot.

Gilbertson, a practicing attorney since the 1990s who helped form foundational aspects of Oregon’s worker’s compensation laws, is incensed that Amazon has attempted to avoid paying for Thompson’s injuries.

“They could have played their video at Amazon at any time during the trial to show what they were talking about. They didn’t bring it,” Gilbertson said. “Now, they’re begging me to settle this case because I want to stick this case so far up their lawyer’s butt it hurts.”

Thompson has another hearing in late May and hopes Amazon will back down. His monthly Social Security check barely covers the low-rent room an old friend lets him stay in, and his food stamps aren’t enough to cover his monthly groceries. If he wins his case, Thompson wants to use the money to move into a new place and finally collect his belongings from Portland.

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He leans on faith that one day, the company will be forced to pay him what he believes he’s owed.

“When I was in the hospital and I was crying about wanting to die, I literally had asked God; I said, ‘Here I am. I have got no money, no place to live. What do you want me to do?” Thompson said. “And I heard him tell me, ‘Trust me.’ It felt like a big hand just wiping away my tears, and I laid down and had the most peaceful sleep.”

Amazon has often succeeded in pushing back on claims that it disregards worker safety.

Throughout the early 2020s, the agency that oversees jobsites in Washington state dinged the company repeatedly for repetitive motion injuries and fast-paced working conditions. State regulators alleged that workers at three warehouses in the company’s home state faced a “serious hazard” from all the bending, lifting and twisting they needed to do on the job to keep up with Amazon’s work standards.

In October 2024, the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals found Amazon’s working conditions didn’t imperil their workers and overturned those fines against the company.

When U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped the final draft of a bulky Senate committee report a few months later, in December 2024, that alleged Amazon’s warehouses are “uniquely dangerous” because the company pushes for productivity over all else, Amazon rebuffed the senator by pointing, in part, to the Washington state court win.

“This report also disregards the results of our aforementioned case in Washington state – even though the senator said the citations in that case were one reason he was opening his investigation in the first place. So, we’ll share the result: after six weeks of testimony from employees, ergonomists, and other experts, a Washington judge ruled in Amazon’s favor,” Amazon wrote in a lengthy reply to Sanders.

The company called anonymous employee complaints “unverified anecdotes” and dismissed allegations in Sanders’ report about excessive heat in its fulfillment centers, noting nearly all of them have a climate control system.

But such rebuttals don’t seem to convince some workers that Amazon puts safety above business.

In an ongoing stream of emails and DMs sent to The Western Edge since Wetmore’s death, a clear message emerged: workers want for Amazon to see and hear them, but many feel, deep down, that may never happen. The sheer size of the company makes that recognition seem impossible.

“This facility has proven in many different ways that health and safety are nothing more than a talking point,” one PDX9 employee wrote on the public My Voice board in the days after Wetmore died. “Unfortunately, this place will continue to get worse as profit and saving on costs will be prioritized over our health and safety.”

Seventy-six of the employee’s co-workers liked the post.14

Pam Wetmore received the glossy, 8x11 cardstock sheet in the “survivor’s guide” packet Amazon sent to her after her son died. The top half was a photo of a sunrise cutting through the clouds above a forested river valley.

“As a living monument to James Wetmore a tree has been planted within the landscapes of the Amazon Rainforest,” it read above an Amazon smile.

Pam pointed to the flyer on the coffee table inside her Troutdale apartment, surrounded by books, jarred candles and dishes that still needed to be packed. Jim had been her longtime caregiver and staying at the apartment was no longer an option.

“I said, whoopee ding. Where is this tree at? In the Amazon Forest somewhere,” she said, her son’s cremains resting in a container on a nearby television stand. “That is no comfort to me at all.”

The only comfort the Wetmores have as they plan for Jim’s memorial service later this week are their own memories.

Jim as a child, splashing in the Sandy River and wandering the aisles of the Troutdale convenience store searching for candy. Jim as a middle schooler, shooting past 6 feet tall and giving up his spot on the basketball team because he was worried about hurting the smaller kids.

The way Jim would come home from a long shift at Amazon and cook dinner for his mother before the pair would watch their favorite show, The Curse of Oak Island. The way he’d toss a felt mouse in the apartment to play fetch with the Bengal cat he rescued. The way he’d make them laugh uncontrollably.

Their thoughts also linger on who Jim became after he started working at PDX9.

“He was pretty tired most every day when he came home,” Pam said.

“He was always exhausted after work,” Jennifer added.

Jennifer was an Amazon Prime member, but now she wants to cancel her membership. She couldn’t help but notice The New York Times offered a look at the opulent wealth of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife the same week Jim died, and that juxtaposition grated on her.

In the days and weeks since April 6, employees at PDX9 have called Pam to give their condolences. Inevitably, the conversations turn to the warehouse’s heat, or the speed of the work, or how people are afraid to speak up because they might lose a job they need to survive. They are painful conversations.

Not long before he died, Jim confided in his mother. He told her he wanted to join the safety committee at PDX9. He had grown concerned that managers there didn’t care about the building’s working conditions.

His mother believes her son wanted to find a way, however small, to advocate for his co-workers. He never got to.

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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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Jule Banville has got a thing for obituaries.

As a professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism, Banville teaches students audio journalism, feature writing — and how to write about dead people. Obituary writing is an art, and Banville captures just how beautiful the process of creating an obituary can be in her brand new podcast, The Obit Project.

On this week’s Notes from The Edge, Banville — who produced the excellent Montana podcast An Absurd Result in 2021 — tells the story of how a few years and a few glasses of wine ago, she and her former colleague at WNYC, Jad Abumrad, came up with a brilliant idea to make a podcast of audio obituaries. The Obit Project itself skirted death several times after studios interested in producing it folded. Industry be damned, Banville and Abumrad remained committed.

The podcast is a celebration of being alive, and several episodes are available now. It’s a show about dead people, yes, but also dead places, dead … elephants. And, at its heart, it’s about journalism.

And, hey, if you like The Western Edge and want us to live a long life, we need you to subscribe. You can get a subscription below via Substack, or if you want to make a donation that is out of Substack’s hands, there’s a button for that, too. We’re cool with either.

Thanks for listening.

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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

Subscribe now

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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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support …

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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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For much of the past year, immigration arrests and enforcement have dominated both local and national news. Here in the Northwest, The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights has collected data on thousands of people who were detained and moved around the country before deportation.

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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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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Thursday was the first national Local News Day, an effort organized by the Montana Free Press and others to highlight the role local journalists play in keeping their communities informed.

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.”

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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 Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support …

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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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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.

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The Western Edge is an independent publication supported entirely by our subscribers. The type of investigative journalism we do is tough, fair and gets results — but it also takes financial support to continue. If you believe in the kind of shoe-leather journalism we do, please consider helping us keep this type of work alive in the Pacific Northwest by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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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.

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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.

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