May 16, 2018
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INSIDE
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photo by D anny p eterSon /t he p ortlanD o bServer
A makeshift memorial with flowers and messages of love appear on the doorstep of the late Eugene
C. Gora’s welding and fabrication shop at the corner of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
and Skidmore Street. Police are investigating the murder of the 85-year-old after he was discovered
dead in his garage on the property last Thursday.
Legacy Fabricator Killed
Community
in shock after
85-Year-old
murdered
D anny p eterSon
t he p ortlanD o bServer
Community members of a
northeast Portland neighborhood
have been stunned by the mur-
der of an 85-year-old man whose
welding shop was a landmark of
Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
A homicide investigation is
ongoing for the death of Eugene
C. Gora after he who was found
dead in his welding shop in north-
east Portland Thursday. Gora had
told a city housing inspector a few
months prior that he had been re-
siding there for over four decades,
by
M ETRO
page 9
a city official said.
Police and emergency per-
sonnel confirmed Gora was dead
when they arrived at his garage at
4232 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr.
Blvd. around 6:30pm Thursday in
response to a call made by a friend
of the deceased who discovered
him unresponsive on his floor.
The circumstances of his death
were noted as “suspicious-in-na-
ture,” according to a press release
by Portland Police that same day
and the Oregon State Medical Ex-
aminer’s office cited “homicidal
violence” as the cause.
Gora was known in the neigh-
borhood as a skilled welder
and fabricator who spent a de-
cades-long career at his shop,
Gora’s Welding and Fabrication,
making barbeques, trailers, and
custom builds like the stainless
steel swoops on the Niketown
store on Martin Luther King Jr.
Boulevard and Northeast Knott
Street, just a few blocks from his
shop.
“He could weld whatever you
had. And he could fabricate what-
ever,” Bart Colson, proprietor of
Bart’s Swedish Formula, an auto
repair shop next door to Gora’s
shop, told the Portland Observer.
Colson had seen Gora on a near
daily basis and noted in recent
years his vision and mobility had
become limited. Lately, he’d got-
ten around using a walker while
visiting local establishments, like
the Miracles Club, a recovery cen-
ter, or the Heavenly Taste Café,
both less than one block away,
chatting up people in the neigh-
borhood.
“He passed his skills and knowl-
C ontinueD on p age 4
School District Faulted in Probe
O PINION
C LASSIFIEDS
C ALENDAR
pages 12-13
pages 14
page 15
Inaction over decades by Port-
land School District supervisors
and inadequate protocols to keep
records of his multiple sexual mis-
conduct complaints on file, may
have enabled a former teacher,
Mitch Whitehurst, to continue to
work with students over a three
decade-long period at multiple
schools, an independent investi-
gative report released Thursday
found.
A lack of teaching training and
disciple protocols that persist to
this day, as well as the district’s
failure to stop him, was also indic-
ative of a complete failure to how
Oregon’s largest school district
handles sexual misconduct, the
report said.
Part of the problem had to do
with the purging of files, which
is required by the teacher’s con-
tract, and may have enabled sex-
ual misconduct to continue when
Whitehurst transferred to different
schools.
Whitehurst has denied the
multiple sexual misconduct com-
plaints against him. He resigned
under pressure in 2015 and his
teacher license was revoked. The
teacher licensing agency found
students had made misconduct
complaints against him going
back to the 1980s.