Portland — A Harney County judge should allow the prosecution to proceed against former Portland Police Chief Larry O’Dea for shooting a friend during an off-duty hunting trip earlier this year, a state Justice Department lawyer argued Tuesday.
O’Dea faces a negligent wounding allegation in the April 21 shooting near Fields, Ore., in Harney County, but has asked that it be dismissed as “unconstitutionally vague.”
Assistant Attorney General Colin Benson said in a response that the “indictment is explicit.”
“Mr. O’Dea wounded Mr. Robert Dempsey with a bullet fired from a gun. This is the act stated as plainly as possible,” Benson said. “The culpability is his failing to act with ordinary care.”
O’Dea’s lawyer contends that the negligent wounding statute is “too open-ended” and the pretrial evidence obtained from the Justice Department doesn’t explain how O’Dea allegedly acted negligently.
O’Dea and Dempsey were part of a group shooting at ground squirrels when O’Dea shot his friend in the lower left of the back with his .22-caliber rifle. Dempsey was airlifted to a trauma hospital in Boise, Idaho, where he was treated and released, according to sheriff’s reports.
Benson said a jury would have to determine whether O’Dea wounded Dempsey with a bullet shot from a firearm and whether O’Dea was using ordinary care when the shooting happened.
It’s not necessary for the indictment to spell out how the accused failed to use care, Benson said. Those details are in police reports and interviews with O’Dea and witnesses, he said.
When a Harney County deputy responded to a 911 call after the shooting, O’Dea suggested that the injury had been self-inflicted, according to sheriff’s office reports. O’Dea told the deputy that his friend may have accidentally shot himself while putting his pistol in his shoulder holster while they were shooting squirrels, the reports show. He didn’t identify himself as Portland’s police chief.
The deputy, according to his report, said he smelled alcohol on O’Dea’s breath. O’Dea told the deputy that he didn’t have his rifle in his hand at the time but was reaching for a drink out of a cooler and heard his friend scream. But O’Dea sometime later called Dempsey to apologize for shooting him.
Chief sues state police
After his release from the hospital, Dempsey was interviewed by the deputy and disclosed for the first time that it was O’Dea who had shot him. He told the sheriff’s office that O’Dea had been having trouble with his rifle all day, that it was jamming and misfiring.
Dempsey told the deputy that O’Dea said he went back to his chair and when he picked up his rifle, it accidentally went off, according to the deputy’s report.
On May 20, O’Dea first acknowledged publicly through a Portland police spokesman that he had a “negligent discharge” of his rifle and shot his friend.
At that time, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said O’Dea had never told the sheriff’s investigators directly that he was responsible for the shooting. The Sheriff’s Office called in Oregon State Police and the state Justice Department to take over the criminal investigation.
O’Dea resigned in late June before he was indicted. His lawyer has said O’Dea wasn’t intoxicated or impaired by alcohol at the time of the shooting.
The former chief has filed a notice of intent to sue the Harney County sheriff, the Oregon State Police and the Oregon Department of Justice, claiming they released reports alleging that O’Dea was impaired by alcohol, intoxicated “and/or showed visible signs of intoxication when he was interviewed by an investigator” after “the unintentional discharge of a firearm” occurred.
