The call flashed over to 911 about five minutes before 4 o'clock on what officers said was a "slow" Sunday afternoon. A homeless man had threatened a security guard at a strip mall at SE 82nd and Powell. He was a chronic trespasser, camping at a nearby abandoned carwash, and was known to carry a knife.
Just 11 minutes later, 67-year-old Thomas Higginbotham, a Vietman War vet with a long criminal record, was dead.
He had been shot by police 10 times, with one of the bullets piercing his aorta and both lungs. His thick clothes had repelled a Taser's probes, and he was striding toward a pair of officers in a small room while holding a large kitchen knife. When he finally fell, outside a small room in the trash-strewed carwash where Officers Jason Lile and Larry Wingfield had confronted him, his left hand was still on the knife's handle.
The January 2 shooting was the eighth by Portland police officers since January 2010, and it marked the end of a seven-week spurt that saw five shootings. A grand jury found no criminal wrongdoing in Higginbotham's shooting. But transcripts released this afternoon (some 210 pages of interviews with police officers and other witnesses) offer new details about what happened—and how yet another call that officers assumed would be routine quickly turned deadly.
"I mean this is the last guy I want to get into shooting with, you know," Wingfield testified. "I don't know, that was a big deal with me being that he was a military service guy and, you know, and being an elderly guy, too. There is nothing about this that I want any part of."
But Wingfield said he also had a regret: that he and Lile had gotten so close to Higginbotham in the first place. Normally police are trained to keep at least 21 to 30 feet away from someone with a blade. In the cramped confines of the abandoned Lucky Car Wash on 82nd, they were never any more than 13 feet away, and probably more like six to eight feet as Lile and Wingfield waited to use force, barking orders at Higginbotham to drop his knife.
Complicating matters? Higginbotham was drunk—his blood alcohol level at .26 percent. Lile's Taser couldn't find easy purchase. And detritus—remnants from other homeless campers having come and gone—littered the floor, blocking an easy retreat.
"And that—you know, that was, honestly, a mistake," says Wingfield. "If I look back on anything I would do differently, I wouldn't let him get this close. He was an older man. He was a veteran. You know, we just didn't want to shoot him. I put my partner at risk. I put myself at risk to try to save this guy."