Murder by Any Other Name

Events in Ferguson, MO remind me of how a Portland SWAT team killed a friend of mine nearly a decade ago.

This is from Buddy Dooley's "People, Polemics & Pooh-Pah: Notes from Under the Bar."

The Death of Raymond Gwerder

I met Raymond in 2000 when we worked together at Jimmy Mak's in Portland’s Pearl District. I started at the club about a week before Ray, so I knew the kitchen's routine pretty well by the time he arrived, and it fell on me to show him how things worked on the hot and cold sides, where storage was located, etc.

In his mid-twenties, Ray was no beginner in the restaurant trade. He'd recently cooked at a high-end French restaurant in Northwest Portland, and it was obvious from the get-go that he knew what he was doing.

Within days he was handling both sides of the kitchen with ease. Rushes didn't faze him, he always found something to do when things slowed, and he loved to invent dishes that weren't on the menu for our dinner breaks.

I'd watch him throw a few ingredients together from the line and come up with something entirely unique. He was creative that way, and always insistent that I try whatever he'd concocted. It was usually excellent. I liked Ray a lot. He had a sense of humor and a dry, sarcastic wit, and one soon got the sense that he was extremely smart. Ray was young, but wise beyond his years.

When I met Ray, I was going through an extremely rough time. A relationship I was in had crumbled and I had fallen into a torpor like none I'd experienced before. Ray and I talked about my condition as I struggled to pull the pieces of my life together. I was a wounded, middle-aged man, and Ray was a kid. He was giving me advice in a kind of father and son role-reversal scenario.

We started hanging out together after our shifts and he'd lambaste me for beating up on myself over a woman whom he reasoned wasn't worthy of my interest. He didn't know the woman, but he understood that if I was hurting that bad she couldn't possibly be worth it. We talked about his situation as well. He loved a girl, he told me. He was succinct. He said he'd like to kill her.

I knew he wasn't serious. He'd simply found a way to handle the pain the relationship had caused him and he, too, was trying to move on. It was blustery and funny, as Ray attempted to shatter the darkness that had surrounded me.

I was stuck, and Ray grew impatient.

But Ray kept at me, using the usual pop psychology one uses in such matters. Get over it, he said. Don't let it ruin you, man!  Don't be stupid about it; there is nothing you can do! On and on, Ray had the answers. He knew I didn't.

I was a mess and Ray knew it. He said, man, take a trip up to Seattle with me. He told me his sister lived there and he was going to visit. I should come along, take my mind off things, meet his sister, and hit Seattle's night life.

I turned him down. Whatever it was I needed, I knew I was in no shape for a road trip.

My work suffered, I had a fight with a co-worker, and Jimmy Mak got pissed off and messed with my under-the-table wages, robbing me essentially.

I walked away from the place.  Jimmy Mak  called: "Where you at? You're late..." I never went back. Things had snowballed into misery.

I found my next job, returning to a place I'd worked before I fell into my destructive relationship, and I tried to keep it together.  Ray dropped by many times to visit while I worked. We hung out. Ray soon quit on Mak as well. He also found the guy to be a jackass.

The food business is highly transient. People come and go in jobs. The wages are poor, people don't always consider the job as a career, people are always looking for a way to move on, a way out.

Ray and I lost track of each other, migratory restaurant workers, and years later I'd started taking a few classes at Portland State to test myself. Could I still read?  Could I, at age 53, do the work?

I ran into Ray one morning in 2004.  We were walking through the campus Park Blocks in opposite directions

Ray was studying biology at PSU. Good, I told him. He had talked often about his desired work. Science was everything to him.  He loved biology more than anything else.

A year later, Ray grew depressed, somehow got his hands on a gun. Maybe he had it all along, I don't know.

He was threatening to use the gun on himself and talking on the phone to a Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) negotiator outside his home when he decided to go back inside. Maybe he was going to put the gun away. Maybe he was going to shoot himself. Nobody knew.

It didn't matter either way. A SERT sniper shot Raymond Gwerder in the back. Ray died 23 minutes later in the hands of the EMTs.  The cops hadn’t tried to save him.

Another crazy depressed kid. It didn't matter.

I think about Ray a lot. One day long ago he may have talked me out of doing something really stupid. But then he let life grab him by the balls, too hard, too rough, and he got a raw deal. The pop psychology didn't work for Ray on Ray, this terribly bright young man.

Leo Besner, a SERT sharpshooter, shot Ray in the back.

The police ended up promoting the shooter five years after the shooting.


TS