Harry Walden was walking toward a payphone near Northeast Williams and Broadway after his truck broke down on the highway.
“I kept hearing these bangs,” the foundry worker recalled later. “Heck, I didn’t know what it was.”
Car salesman Bill Briggs drove passed the ambling Walden that morning. He heard the bangs too — and suddenly had trouble maintaining control of his car. He didn’t realize the vehicle had been hit by four rifles shots.
Over the next two hours on Nov. 29, 1976, a rooftop gunman would snap off more than 70 rounds.
The 1970s is known for being the colorful Me Decade, an era noted for its bell-bottom jeans, sexual liberation and disco soundtrack.
But it also was a time of punishing stagflation and high unemployment, fueling anger and frustration. Most of all, it was a time of violence.
And so, 45 years ago, sniper fire crackled in Portland on at least six separate occasions over a 12-month period.
It was shortly before 8 a.m. on a chilly Monday when Walden and Briggs found themselves in the middle of the sixth one.
After feeling his car shake, Briggs turned onto Victoria Street, near Memorial Coliseum. He pulled to the side of the road and stepped out of the sedan. He found large bullet holes punched into the passenger-side door.
The shooter, a 20-year-old California national guardsman named Daniel Harmon Jones, was on the roof of the Holiday Inn on Weidler.
The police found out about the sniper that morning by being targeted: patrol officers Morley Fletcher and Barry Cook were driving east on Weidler when three bullets hit their cruiser.
“We felt the car shudder,” Fletcher told reporter James Long a few hours later. “We knew we had been hit.”
Fletcher pulled around the corner and got on the car’s radio. Cook jumped out of the vehicle and hurried toward the intersection of Broadway and Victoria to divert traffic. Harry Walden, about to call his boss from a gas-station payphone, watched the officers, still confused about what was happening.
“I saw this cop, and all of a sudden he went down,” Walden recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, ‘Hey, he’s down. He’s shot.'”
Nancy Viamonte also saw Cook drop. The young nurse parked her car on the side of the road and ran to him, thinking he was having a seizure. Cook was dazed and in pain but OK. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest, which had stopped the .22-caliber bullet. He told Viamonte he’d been shot.
“I found the bullet lodged in his vest,” Viamonte recalled. “I saw a large hematoma about an inch in diameter [on his chest], but his pulse was strong. There wasn’t much I could do for him medically, but I stayed with him.”
Now the sniper picked up his pace. Bullets whizzed, sparking on the pavement, hitting more cars. The glass in the front doors of the gas-station’s convenience store exploded. The gunman shot out a tire of the ambulance that arrived for Cook.
Why was Jones, the rifle-wielding Californian on the hotel roof, doing this? He thought he wanted to die.
“It’s kind of hard to explain why I’m committing suicide,” Jones wrote in a note he left in his fifth-floor room at the Holiday Inn. “I’m 20 years old and I don’t see any real future for me.”
He wrote that he would have preferred to have been born 150 years earlier “because the world today is all f—ed up.”
Jones used his military training to hold off police. He appeared to be enjoying himself, witnesses said. Now and again, he would stand up and wave at officers positioned on top of another building.
Ultimately, he decided he didn’t want to die. At around 10 a.m., he put his hands on his head and moved into the open on the roof. Moments later, police burst out of the stairwell and tackled him. (A jury would find Jones guilty of attempted manslaughter and recklessly endangering others, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was paroled in 1984.)
By the time Jones started shooting at cars that cold November morning, law enforcement in the city had become accustomed to exactly this kind of challenging public-safety emergency. The string of sniper attacks had started almost exactly a year before.
On Nov. 3, 1975, a well-hidden shooter spent about an hour peppering Southwest Portland roads with bullets. The gunfire hit at least five cars and wounded a salesman as the man drove on Southwest Canyon Road near the Oregon Zoo overpass.
The first reported shot thumped into a car shortly after 4 a.m. Half an hour later, a commuter saw “a flash from above” and heard a pop as he drove east on Southwest Barbur Blvd. Later came reports of shots fired in the Vista Ridge tunnel. Police did not find the shooter or shooters.
Then, on Nov. 12, motorists heard gunshots near Northeast 102nd Avenue and Hancock Drive. Later in the day, more people heard gunshots, with one driver on the Banfield Freeway insisting that a bullet had zipped past his car. Another driver on the highway spotted “a man in dark clothing with a rifle” standing on a raised slick of land, but police couldn’t locate the suspect.
Seven months later, on a late June night in 1976, a sniper shot and killed a 20-year-old Navy sailor in Northeast Portland’s Irving Park. A series of follow-up shots immediately followed, spaced about seven seconds apart, scattering others in the park. Police were stumped, calling the killing random and “senseless.”
On Aug. 24, 1976, gunfire popped during rush hour from the vicinity of the Weidler Street overpass on Interstate 5. Law enforcement closed the freeway and searched the surrounding neighborhood. A man later called the police, identified himself as the sniper and said he was at a payphone on Northeast 1st Avenue. Officers rushed to the area but found no one.
A month later, more gunfire, this time coming from a roof across the street from the McDonald’s on Northeast Union Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd). Employees and customers at the fast-food restaurant locked themselves in the basement.
The Holiday Inn episode followed in November, capping the 12 months of shootings.
Daniel Jones apparently had nothing to do with any of the earlier unsolved cases (he was in California until two weeks before he took to the hotel roof). And the sniper attacks in Portland didn’t cease after his arrest. Most notably, a gunman shot at passing cars one day in August 1977, paralyzing a responding police officer before the sniper committed suicide. But the frequency of the shootings finally fell away.
What was the reason for these terrifying incidents? Was it the bad economy? Was it the counterculture-fueled revolutionary fervor that still bubbled through pockets of the country?
One Portland clinical psychologist blamed it on Hollywood.
“Research bears out the direct relationship of violence on television and in the movies to the behavior of people,” Arnold Labby opined in the newspapers. He added that ultra-modern, high-tech culture was leading to “de-personalization,” that we were “losing sight of people as people.”
Jones’ trial in 1977 offered no evidence that popular entertainment influenced him to act, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Labby was off-base. One young woman in the Holiday Inn during the shooting called The Oregon Journal as Jones was firing off round after round above her.
“My room faces Northeast Weidler and Vancouver,” the woman reported. “I can hear the shots and there’s a policeman behind a telephone pole across the street.”
She added:
“Of course, it’s exciting. Like being in a television series.”
