SINCE 1979 • VOLUME 39, NO. 36
SECTION A
JUNE 8, 2018
$1.00
Bullet from Polk County shooting
range pierces
Keizer home
By ERIC A. HOWALD
Of the Keizertimes
Shots fi red from an old quarry being used as
a makeshift shooting range across the Willamette
River made their most invasive presence known in
Keizer Saturday, June 2.
Four men were cited for reckless endangering
and are expected to be in court later this month.
At 10:06 a.m., Keizer police responded to a
home in the 1300 block of Raphael Street North.
Offi cer Jeremie Fletcher recovered a bullet, be-
lieved to have been fi red from the shooting range,
after it penetrated the home exterior wall and col-
lided with a granite backsplash.
“The bullet came to rest on a kitchen counter
inside,” said Deputy Chief Jeff Kuhns of the Keiz-
er Police Department (KPD). One of the home-
owners was in the kitchen when the bullet came
The foursome is scheduled to appear in Polk
through the wall.
KPD coordinated with the Polk County Sheriff ’s County Circuit Court June 26 at 1:15 p.m.
Kuhns added that Keizer police are continuing to
Offi ce that dispatched offi cers to the quarry.
investigate the incident and additional
“We went out there and found
charges may be forthcoming.
four people target practicing. All co-
The incident follows a similar one
operative and remorseful,” said Polk
that occured in September 2017. On
County Sheriff Mark Garton.
Sept. 10, a hail of bullets drove visitors
Emmett and Wyatt Davis, 18 and
out of Sunset Park and residents out
20, respectively, of West Salem; Noah
of their homes. Police offi cers con-
Murayama, 22, of Keizer; and Austin
fronted a group using the shooting
Williams, 27, of Salem were all cited
range and led offi cers to a car with an
for reckless endangering and released
in lieu of arrest.
— Mark Garton AR-15 inside it but no one confessed
Garton said even if the bullet had
Polk vounty Sheriff to using it. Offi cers could not prove
the AR-15 had been fi red or who had
not traveled into a home, the four sus-
done so, but they suspect someone
pects were negligent.
“The way they were shooting was not safe and we was using it to shoot at clay targets tossed into the air.
could still have charged them,” Garton said.
Please see BULLET, Page A5
“The way
they were
shooting was
not safe.”
McNary grad accepted to Stanford
Llanos leading for valifornia this fall
By DEREK WILEY
Of the Keizertimes
Crystal Llanos thought she
might be hallucinating.
So the McNary senior
brought her laptop and showed
the letter to her sister, the one
congratulating her for being
admitted to Stanford Univer-
sity, which at 4.3 percent had
its lowest admission rate in the
school’s history.
Lower than Harvard (4.59),
Princeton (5.5) and Yale (6.9).
Linda confi rmed the letter.
It was real.
“I honestly never thought I
was going to get in from the
start,” Llanos said. “I didn’t
think that was a possibility for
me.”
Llanos’ dream school was
the University of Southern
California. She only applied
to Stanford because two of her
close friends did. But Llanos
still worked hard on the ap-
plication, spending an hour
to two every night for three
weeks, writing and then re-
writing her answers.
“I still don’t know exactly
why or what inside told me to
make this the best you possi-
bly can, even with the mental-
ity that I wasn’t going, that I
wasn’t getting in,” Llanos said.
“I’d like to think that it was
just out of respect for the in-
stitution. I knew that they re-
ceived many applications and
I kind of didn’t want to waste
their time with not my best
work. So I worked really, really
hard on that. And I felt good
about what I’d written. It was
SALEM-KEIZER PUBLIv SvHOOLS/Bryan Anderson
McNary senior vrystal Llanos, with her brother Luis, a second grader at Weddle Elementary,
returned to her former elementary school in cap and gown last week for the parade of honor.
exactly what I wanted to say
and I was answering it in the
most honest way possible.”
In early December, Llanos
met with her friends for din-
ner to celebrate how hard they
had worked on their Stanford
applications. When her friends
read they had not been accept-
ed, Llanos didn’t think she had
a chance. She waited hours to
open her email from Stanford.
After building up the cour-
age, Llanos discovered she was
deferred and Stanford was still
considering her application.
“It was a huge surprise,”
Llanos said. “It felt like they
had said yes because I was ex-
pecting a no. I was expecting a
Please see GRAD, Page A5
veltics
graduate
June 8 at
fairgrounds
McNary High School will
say goodbye to the class of
2018 with a graduation cer-
emony on
Friday, June
8 at 2 p.m.
at the Or-
egon State
Fairgrounds
Pavilion.
Louis Tiller, a math teacher
at McNary for 19 years and
a 2017 Crystal Apple award
winner, is the keynote speaker.
Senior Samuel Hernandez
will also address the graduates.
McNary
has
16
va l e d i c t o r i a n s — S a m u e l
Hernandez,
Matthew
Albright, Kailey Doutt, Austin
Epperly, Sydnie Gould, Noah
Grunberg, Jonas Honeyman,
Crystal Llanos, Beau Reitz,
Michael
Reyes,
Jenna
Robbins, Madesyn Samples,
Megan Schneider, Jessy Shore,
Emma Snyder, and Casey
Toavs; and four salutatorians—
Sydney Hamilton, Josiah
Metz, Sophia Salinas and
Madeline Weathers.
McNary’s band will play
Pomp and Circumstance and
The Star Spangled Banner.
Principal Erik Jespersen,
assisted by teachers Gary
Bulen, Dawn Reichle Bailon,
Laura Reid, and Joshua Rist,
will present the graduating
class.
Keizer veteran celebrated as liberating hero
Submitted
George Thompson, a U.S. Army deteran, takes part in a Liberation Day parade in Pilsen, vzechia,
last month.
By ERIC A. HOWALD
Of the Keizertimes
U.S. Army Pvt. George
Thompson never expected
to return to the country he
helped liberate from Nazi oc-
cupation 50 years later. He
never imagined that he would
deliver a speech in Czechia
following one by then-Sec-
retary of State Madeline Al-
bright and then meet the
oldest son of Gen. George
Patton, the man who led his
fellow troops to victory in Eu-
rope during World War II.
However, Thompson has
done all those things as a 14-
time guest of honor during
Liberation Day, the country’s
annual celebration of tossing
off the Nazi yoke in 1945.
“There were 20,000 people
standing shoulder-to-shoulder
listening to little old me,” said
Thompson, coyly.
In 1945, Thompson was a
20-year-old tank mechanic
with Lightning Power, the
16th Armored Division. He’d
grown up in north-central
Kansas and planned to enlist
with the U.S. Army upon his
high school graduation, but he
was drafted two weeks before
he could claim his diploma in
person.
“I was a tough, young
country boy and they sent me
to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for a
tough and thorough training,”
Thompson said. “The city
boys couldn’t hack it. They
would fall out of march and I
never did.”
Thompson, now 93, still re-
tains a midwestern drawl when
speaking even though he is sev-
eral decades removed from that
part of the country. After years
of helping his father work on
Skyline
helps fund
scoreboard
PAGE B1
Gates
scholar
gets pick of
schools
PAGE A2
Teens
moving on
from Keizer
Chamber
PAGE B7
Downer to
Clackamas
PAGE B2
Please see VET, Page A7
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