A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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news@bakercityherald.com
Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Pressure on
to decide on
detective
B
aker City Police Chief Ty Duby told the
Herald recently that the city can’t keep De-
tective Shannon Regan on paid administra-
tive leave “indefinitely.”
Obviously.
But city residents could hardly be blamed for
wondering just how long this period, when the city
is paying Regan $6,000 per month but not allowing
her to work, will turn out to be.
Duby placed Regan on leave in July 2021. He had
little choice but to do so after La Grande defense
attorney Jim A. Schaeffer alleged that Regan, the
lead detective in the fatal shooting of Angela Par-
rish in Baker City in January 2020, listened to five
phone calls between Schaeffer and his client, sus-
pect Shawn Quentin Greenwood, in 2020. Schaef-
fer argued in court that Regan violated Green-
wood’s rights, and the attorney sought to dismiss
all charges against Greenwood.
Judge Matt Shirtcliff declined to do so, but he did
rule that Greg Baxter, Baker County district attor-
ney, couldn’t use at trial any evidence that Regan
collected after Sept. 14, 2020, the day her computer
was used to access and listen to the phone calls, ac-
cording to an investigation by the Oregon Depart-
ment of Justice. Greenwood later pleaded no con-
test to three lesser charges and was sentenced to 90
months in prison.
Two issues have a direct bearing on Regan’s em-
ployment situation. First, the Department of Justice
is investigating whether Regan broke any laws (offi-
cial misconduct is probably the most likely charge,
if so). Duby said he hasn’t heard any results from
the investigation. The second issue is whether the
district attorney could use Regan as a trial witness
in the future. If not, it’s difficult to imagine how the
city could continue to employ her as a police offi-
cer, as testifying is a vital part of the job, particu-
larly for a detective.
Duby and City Manager Jon Cannon need an-
swers to both those questions. And then they need
to make a prompt decision about Regan’s status.
Prolonging this situation is a misuse of city dol-
lars, and it deprives Regan of the ability to plan for
the future.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
YOUR VIEWS
Vote no on the Baker Rural Fire
District tax levy
state law and does not publish or post its
budget for the taxpayers to read or com-
ment on.
I was a member of this Fire District for
These factors along with other exam-
several years until the board pulled sev-
ples of bad management requires addi-
eral stunts to the detriment of the depart- tional funds to keep to the same amateur-
ment as a whole.
ish path during these inflationary times.
The present management and the ma-
Please do not enable this department
jority of the board have practiced bad
to increase the amount of taxes it mis-
management to the extent that the vast
spends. It’s time to stop this local govern-
majority of the firefighters have resigned. ment’s negligent behavior!
This department has not been able to re-
Addison Johnson
spond to emergencies with qualified per-
Baker City
sonnel for the last several years.
Extended administrative leave
The board has mismanaged the bud-
get by purchasing dilapidated equipment unfair to employee, citizens
from acquaintance’s (tenders) and de-
pleted the budget enough to now require
I wanted to take a moment and com-
these additional funds to operate.
ment on the article titled, “Baker City
The new station that was just pur-
Police detective remains on paid leave.”
chased is in a physical location that elim- I first want to clarify that I have neither
inated several properties up Salmon
heard nor seen any evidence, from either
Creek to be covered by the insurance
side of this situation, other than what the
companies, the ISO (insurance services
DA was quoted as saying during the early
organization) requires a station within
stages of the investigation. What I do
five miles of the property. This station
want to talk about is administrative leave
does benefit the city fire department, for and what it is intended for.
which he is the newest Chief and is also
I too find it a travesty that the citizens
the Chief Baker Rural Dept. and is paid
of Baker City are paying for an employee
by both departments, this arrangement
to not do their job for this length of time.
has obligated the Baker Rural depart-
What I find is a bigger travesty is having
ment to all of sudden be required to pay
any employee, much less one with over 20
state PERS. He also uses a Baker Rural
years of dedicated service to the citizens
vehicle to commute daily to and from the of Baker City, sitting at home each day
city department which costs the Rural
for the past 7 months not knowing what
more funds.
decisions are going to be made about
The department has failed to follow
their future.
I was taught that administrative leave
was intended as a tool that could be em-
ployed to protect the city and the em-
ployee while a prompt, thorough inves-
tigation was completed to determine if
policy and/or criminal violation(s) were
committed by an employee. What it was
not intended for is a means of placing
an employee on leave for an indefinite
amount of time while a bureaucracy tries
to figure out how to settle a matter. That
isn’t fair to the city, the department, the
citizens or the employee.
What you are seeing is the result of a
lack of leadership. There is absolutely no
rational reason for this investigation to
have lasted for 7 months and counting.
During my career I placed numerous em-
ployees on administrative leave. Although
I don’t remember the exact timeframes,
you’d be hard pressed to find an em-
ployee who was on leave for more than 1
or 2 weeks at the most, whether it was an
in-house investigation or outsourced to
another agency. I will bet that you could
contact Ontario, La Grande and Pendle-
ton Police departments and find similar
timeframes for personnel investigations.
It’s past time for Chief Duby and City
Manager Cannon to start rattling cages,
whether it be at the Department of Jus-
tice or the District Attorney’s Office and
get this matter settled. You owe it to the
citizens of Baker City and especially to
your employee.
Wyn Lohner
Retired Baker City Police chief
CONTACT YOUR PUBLIC OFFICIALS
President Joe Biden: The White House, 1600
Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500; 202-456-
1111; to send comments, go to www.whitehouse.gov.
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley: D.C. office: 313 Hart Senate
Office Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., 20510;
202-224-3753; fax 202-228-3997. Portland office: One
World Trade Center, 121 S.W. Salmon St. Suite 1250,
Portland, OR 97204; 503-326-3386; fax 503-326-2900.
Baker City office, 1705 Main St., Suite 504, 541-278-
1129; merkley.senate.gov.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden: D.C. office: 221 Dirksen Senate
Office Building, Washington, D.C., 20510; 202-224-
5244; fax 202-228-2717. La Grande office: 105 Fir St.,
No. 210, La Grande, OR 97850; 541-962-7691; fax, 541-
963-0885; wyden.senate.gov.
U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz (2nd District): D.C. office: 1239
Longworth House Office Building, Washington, D.C.,
20515, 202-225-6730; fax 202-225-5774. Medford
office: 14 N. Central Avenue Suite 112, Medford, OR
97850; Phone: 541-776-4646; fax: 541-779-0204;
Ontario office: 2430 S.W. Fourth Ave., No. 2, Ontario,
OR 97914; Phone: 541-709-2040. bentz.house.gov.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: 254 State Capitol, Salem,
OR 97310; 503-378-3111; www.governor.oregon.gov.
Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read: oregon.
treasurer@ost.state.or.us; 350 Winter St. NE, Suite 100,
Salem OR 97301-3896; 503-378-4000.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum:
Justice Building, Salem, OR 97301-4096; 503-378-
4400.
COLUMN
A sordid but little-known piece of Oregon history
T
hat someone went to an Or-
egon state park on a summer
night and attacked two young
women with an ax, inflicting nearly
fatal wounds on one and leaving the
other permanently scarred, is terrible.
But this story is even worse than
that single sentence, horrific as it
surely is, suggests.
The ax-wielder, who preceded the
flurry of bloody blows by driving
his pickup truck over the tent where
the women were sleeping, leav-
ing tire marks on one of them, was
never arrested.
Yet even if this man presented him-
self today at the headquarters of the
Oregon State Police and admitted that
he had done the deed, he could then
walk back out the door and the cops
would have no legal authority to im-
pede, much less to arrest, him.
That’s the basic outline of a story
that seems to me ought to be better
known than it is.
I have what I think is a fairly thor-
ough knowledge, for a layperson
with neither law enforcement nor
legal experience, of Oregon’s sordid
criminal history.
I’ve read all of the late Ann Rule’s
books about killers who prowled the
state in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
I also read widely about more re-
cent, heavily publicized cases.
In researching a series of stories
for the Baker City Herald in 2004,
I listened to the audio recording of
a man who confessed to killing his
pregnant wife and their three chil-
dren the year before.
(I see no need in naming any of
these cretins; it’s unfortunate that kill-
ers’ names are more prominent than
those of their victims.)
But the story of the women who
were run over and hacked with an
implement normally used to chop
kindling is not widely known, so far
as I can tell, except perhaps in Cen-
tral Oregon.
That’s where it happened.
It happened a long time ago, to be
sure, in 1977. I suspect the duration
partially explains this episode’s rela-
tively modest legacy.
(Although D.B. Cooper’s 1971 ca-
per, to cite only one even older crime,
seems to have lost little of its ability to
obsess self-appointed sleuths.)
But I think too that the case failed
to lodge itself into the state’s collective
memory in part because the story isn’t
as awful as it easily could have been.
Both women survived.
Such is the perverse nature of pub-
licity.
Just as murderers’ infamy surpasses
the public’s knowledge of their vic-
tims, crimes that involve the infliction
of horrible, but not quite fatal, injuries
tend not to inspire books and docu-
mentaries and movies.
Still and all, it strikes me as passing
strange that this episode, which hap-
pened on the night of June 22, 1977,
at Cline Falls State Park, along the De-
schutes River a few miles west of Red-
mond, is not especially notorious.
It’s unsolved, for one thing, and
those mysteries which lack resolu-
tion tend to captivate us with a par-
ticular power.
Moreover, though it’s not implausi-
nial route designated the year before,
America’s 200th birthday.
They were a week into their ride,
which started in Astoria, when they
camped at Cline Falls. They never
ble that the attacker might some day
pedaled another mile together.
be identified, the unfortunate history
Weiss, who was struck in the head
of Oregon’s statute of limitations for
with an ax (or possibly hatchet; the
attempted murder ensures that the
details of the weapon, which was
man will never stand before a judge or never found, aren’t absolute), nearly
jury to answer for the crimes.
died. She has no memory of the at-
I knew nothing of the Cline Falls at- tack. Her eyesight was diminished for-
tack until several years ago — I don’t re- ever, although she became a doctor.
call the precise period — when I came
Jentz, however, vividly recalled the
across a book in the true crime section incident.
at the Baker County Public Library.
Her injuries were less life-threat-
The book, “Strange Piece of Para-
ening but still appalling. The ax blade
dise,” was published in 2006. The au- sliced through the skin of her fore-
thor, Terri Jentz, is one of the women arm and into the bone. A pickup tire
who were attacked.
cracked her collarbone and some ribs.
I recently re-read the book — the
She had a distinct recollection of
same copy from the same library —
her attacker. Though she didn’t see
after listening to a podcast that fea-
his face, she had a good look at his
tured the story.
legs, clad in clean blue jeans, and a
Jentz is an immensely talented
shirt tucked neatly into the pants.
writer. Her prose, and in particular
Jentz frequently describes the attack-
her ability to evoke the essence of the er’s attire as “meticulous.”
Central Oregon landscape, with its ar-
Jentz didn’t return to Oregon un-
omatic sage and juniper and its dusty til 1992.
expanses of high desert and its vistas
That year she embarked on what
of volcano and glacier, elevates what
would become an investigation ex-
would be a compelling narrative even tending over nearly a decade during
in the hands of a lesser writer.
which she learned that a Redmond
The story started in mid June of
man was widely suspected among lo-
1997. Just a couple weeks earlier, the
cal residents, though never formally
Portland Trail Blazers won their first, charged, of being the attacker.
and only, NBA championship.
Jentz uses the pseudonym “Dirk
Jentz and her roommate at Yale,
Duran” for the suspect, who she
Shayna Weiss (a pseudonym), in-
comes to believe was indeed guilty.
tended to ride their bicycles 4,200
The man has a long list of criminal
miles across the U.S., from the Pacific charges in Deschutes County, span-
to the Atlantic, on the BikeCenten-
ning more than 30 years. He was con-
Jayson
Jacoby
victed of coercion and unlawful use
of a firearm in a 1997 trial — which
Jentz attended — and sentenced to
five years in prison.
His most recent conviction, for an
October 2016 incident, was for ha-
rassment.
Prior to that, however, Jentz
learned, to her disgust, that the stat-
ute of limitations for attempted mur-
der in Oregon was just three years.
Which means that by June 22, 1980
— a dozen years before she returned
to Oregon to revisit the place where
her life had been irrevocably changed
— Jentz’s attacker was free from the
fear of being prosecuted, and for the
perverse reason that none of his blows
was quite fatal.
Jentz testified in 1997 before the
Oregon Legislature in support of a bill
that eliminated the statute of limita-
tions for attempted murder. The bill
became law, but because it wasn’t ret-
roactive it had no effect on the Cline
Falls attacker.
Which, in one sense, is the end of
the story.
An unsatisfying ending, to be sure.
Yet the absence of a neat conclu-
sion is also part of what makes Jentz’s
book, and this episode, so fascinating,
and frightening.
I can think of no better adjective
than the second one, anyway, for the
reality that a man got away with driv-
ing over a tent in which two people
slept, and then attacking both with
an ax.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.