One person is dead following a shooting in the Madison South neighborhood last Sunday night. According to officers, a patrolling East Precinct sergeant was flagged down around 11:30 p.m. and told a body had been found near Northeast 82nd Avenue and Northeast Milton Street. The sergeant later found the body of a man with an apparent gunshot wound.
Additionally, police arrested a 39-year-old man Saturday in connection to two shootings last year. Police said members of the police bureau’s new Focused Intervention Team pulled Carlos Rodriguez-Lanz over just after 5:30 p.m. in the 7400 block of North Lombard Street after they said he was driving recklessly. Rodriguez-Lanz is connected to a shooting August 13 in the 500 block of NE Broadway. A woman was seriously wounded in that shooting.
The other shooting occurred in the early morning hours of Oct. 5, 2021 in the 500 block of Northeast Holladay Street. Police said a man was shot and wounded. He survived his life-threatening injuries. The frequency of deadly crimes began to increase in June 2020 and has hardly slowed down since, totaling roughly 150 incidents since January 2020. That’s more than the number of cases from the five years between 2015 and 2019.
“Behind each number is a person’s name, and it was a person that was loved who is no longer here and a grieving family that has to go through this horrible incident, and they deserve justice. They deserve us solving these cases,” Foote said.
The homicide unit has grown in the last couple years, from 10 detectives in January 2020 to 18 currently. However, police leaders have said that’s not enough, given how many more people have been killed. Portland’s homicide rate last year, the number of people killed compared to the population, outpaced major American cities like New York City and Los Angeles.
