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This is a breaking news story, and was last updated Monday, June 22. We will continue to update this story as news comes in.

The City Administrator of the Columbia River city of St. Helens, Oregon, John Walsh, who had been the city government’s top boss for more than a decade, slipped and fell off of city docks around 10 p.m. on Saturday June 13, according to multiple sources.

In a press release on June 20, the city noted that Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, Cowlitz County Sheriff’s Office, and the U.S. Coast Guard all assisted in recovery efforts. Searchers located his body that day near the city docks where he fell in a week earlier.

Former St. Helens city mayor Rick Scholl told The Western Edge that he assisted in search efforts on the Sunday morning after Walsh went missing.

“It’s just so sad. His kids, his wife. It’s just tragic. That Columbia is so dangerous,” Scholl said when reached by phone on Sunday.

Scholl said he knew a potential tragedy was playing out Saturday, June 13, around 10:15 pm when he was smoking a cigarette on his porch and saw rescue vehicles speed toward the city docks. Scholl ventured downtown and saw a crowd gathered around, as well as many other boaters on the docks. They told him a man had fallen in the Columbia River while getting off a friend’s boat and was quickly swept down river.

The next morning, Scholl received a text message from Walsh’s wife, Jolene, asking if he’d join the search.

“It’s a tragic accident,” Scholl said. “One thing I can say about John is that he was a very decent person. I can’t remember one time he was ever aggressive or belittled another person.”

Scholl said by Sunday morning, the U.S. Coast Guard had called off helicopter operations to locate Walsh.

Mayor Jennifer Massey, in tears, called an emergency meeting of the St Helens city council that afternoon to appoint an interim city manager. Walsh’s typical seat, to the left of Massey, was empty and his nameplate had been removed.

St. Helens Finance Director Gloria Butsch was appointed to the job for two weeks.

“I hate that we have to do this so quickly,” councilor Brandon Sundeen said.

“Yeah, it feels wrong,” Massey said.

“It’s painful,” councilor Jessica Chilton said.

“Saturday we lost our City Administrator of almost 14 years, and as staff, we are not okay,” King wrote in the city’s Facebook post, noting that a site would be set up in Columbia View Park where residents could “leave your notes, your cards, your flowers and candles, or anything else that you think will honor the memory of John.”

“Police believe that Walsh accidentally fell into the water. There is no suspicion of foul play,” St. Helens spokesperson Crystal King wrote in a press release posted to Facebook on Monday June 15.

St. Helens city councilors and the St. Helens Police Department did not respond to direct requests for comment by The Western Edge

River conditions can be particularly dangerous in the Northwest in early summer months, as warm air temperatures heat up the body but water temperatures remain extremely cold due to mountain snow melting. The Columbia Riverkeeper has cautioned swimmers to “beware of fast currents and steep dropoffs” when swimming in the river.

Northwest cities frequently see lives lost in such conditions due to cold shock that can make swimming difficult. On Saturday, The Oregonian reported that a teenager died while jet-skiing near Meldrum Bar Park, near the confluence of the Willamette and Clackamas Rivers. In 2024, internationally-lauded Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy drowned while floating the Willamette River.

Walsh had a long career working for city governments around the Northwest. He was hired as city administrator of St. Helens in 2012 — outcompeting 70 other candidates for the job, according to reports at that time. He previously served as the city administrator in Myrtle Point, a small city in southwestern Oregon and, prior to that, worked in public works and community development positions in both Centralia and Pacific, Washington.

Walsh is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in geography and urban planning.

At the time of his hiring, he told The Columbia County Chronicle & Chief that he was excited to live in St. Helens “because of its proximity to the Columbia River.”

In a 2022 Facebook post, the city celebrated Walsh’s 10th year on the job, noting he was “a steady leader and someone who has charted a forward-looking course for our growing city while keeping the mission of providing quality, effective, and efficient service to our citizens at the center of everything that we do.”

Walsh played integral roles in developing St. Helens’ trademark Halloweentown festival and transforming the city’s waterfront from former industrial land to a burgeoning business park and recreational area.

John and Jolene Walsh raised three children together, according to Scholl.

“He was a really good dad and loved his family very very much,” the former mayor stated. “He was respected by his peers. Of course, we can critique anyone’s work. But as a human being, he was one of the good ones. We lost a good one.”

In the city’s Facebook post, Massey provided a statement: “We understand that John was more than just a City Administrator. He and his family live here and are involved as community members. They have touched many people’s lives, and we hope that providing this tribute location is a way for the St. Helens community to come together, grieve together, and begin to heal.”

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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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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.

The Western Edge recently chatted with reporter Alexandra Duggan of the outstanding Spokane, Washington, newspaper The Spokesman Review. We discussed the problems with Idaho officers doing the work of ICE agents, sanctuary states and the ways national media can stereotype Idaho.

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The Western Edge is just two months old, and since the moment we hit publish on our very first story, we’ve been working nonstop. I think you would have a hard time finding two journalists who really believe in journalism like we do, who are nerdy about this craft like we are.

This project was born out of a deep love for the Pacific Northwest, the region where we live and our growing concern over how news deserts are overtaking it. We were frustrated with the corporate bloat of newsrooms, even on a local level and how that’s bending coverage toward access rather than accountability. When people with big salaries in boardrooms make decisions about the information reporters spend time collecting, that hurts everyone in our region.

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The Western Edge is just two people: Leah Sottile (hi, that’s me) and Ryan Haas. Getting this project off the ground was not easy, and it came after a period loss and mourning of the journalism industry we have long worked in. We are happy to report that the support we’ve received from our paid subscribers is helping us already have an impact on the region.

First, when we launched, we both thought it would be important to tell you why we decided to go out on our own, and start a new outlet:

The message that we’ve received loud and clear from our readers is that you believe in the power of what we do, and you want to see more investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest, not less.

In the past two months, we’ve been having a ball publishing stories from around the region that reflect our ethics and priorities as journalists: hold powerful people to account, write stories that are as interesting as they are informative and have some fun while we’re doing it.

In February we published our story on Kyle Hedquist, of Salem, Oregon. Lots of reporters had written about Hedquist, but few had gotten to the heart of why exactly the city had come to focus so intensely on him in December of last year.

Our story uncovered how a manufactured crisis by the local police union, which was supported by local politicians, pointed the ire of an entire community toward this one man.

It’s a fascinating investigation that asks readers to consider one question: Is redemption possible in the capital city of progressive Oregon?

In March, we released an investigation into a scandal involving the former police chief of St Helens, Oregon, Brian Greenway, and his quest to get every cent of the city budget that he could for his officers.

The story — which was shouted out by The Columbia Journalism Review as “a fantastic piece of journalism” — involves a porn-texting police chief, a mayor glued to Facebook and a town that can’t let go of the 2024 election, even as they head into a new one in 2026.

Our story revealed how the former chief and members of the police union discussing plotted in text messages to oust the mayor from office, and showed how the current mayor continues to fan the flames of controversy.

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.

Since we published our story early Monday morning, we’ve updated it with a 911 recording, statements from Amazon and information about how long workers were kept on the job until supervisors said they could leave.

As of this writing, we are the only Northwest publication to cover this story.1 National and international outlets, however, seem more interested in how one of the Northwest’s most powerful corporations treats its workers: Our reporting has been picked up by TechCrunch, More Perfect Union and The Times of India, among many others.

We can’t wait for you to see all of the other stories (and videos) we have planned, and we can guarantee that every dollar of your paid subscription will go directly into the journalism we make. As always, if you have a tip on a story, send us an email: hellowesternedge@gmail.com.

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.

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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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

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.”

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 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 …

Read more

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 the past year, Americans have watched as immigration officers across the country have engaged in chaotic and aggressive arrest operations. Protests soon followed in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, where federal officers killed Rene Good and Alex Pretti.

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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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

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.

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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 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

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.”

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