Grand Jury Clears Police Officers in Fatal Shooting of Patrick Kimmons

A temporary memorial to Patrick Kimmons placed at the site of his death. Alex Zielinski

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A Multnomah County grand jury has ruled that the two Portland police officers that fatally shot Patrick Kimmons on Sunday, September 30 were justified in their use of force.

According to police reports, Sergeant Garry Britt and Officer Jeffrey Livingston encountered Kimmons, 27, while they were patrolling a downtown parking lot near the corner of SW 3rd and SW Harvey Milk, shortly after 3 am. The officers first noticed two unidentified people fighting with each other in the parking lot—and then, according to reports, witnessed Kimmons fire 5 shots at both of the fighting individuals.

Officers claim Kimmons then began running towards them, holding his firearm. Britt and Livingston promptly fired 12 rounds at Kimmons. Here's the Portland Police Bureau's (PPB) official timeline of events.

PPB has since released footage from a pair of security cameras that hazily captures the incident. It's believed Kimmons is the individual in white shoes who runs directly toward the officers, cutting off toward a line of parked cars just feet from the two police.

Kimmons' family members say this video doesn't show the entire picture. PPB allegedly showed his family a much longer version of the surveillance tape before releasing the 30-second one to the public this afternoon. Family members and friends flocked to the Multnomah County Courthouse this afternoon to protest the grand jury verdict and demand the District Attorney release the entire video.

“We’ve seen the footage ourselves… we can see his hands were up as he was shot," said Sequoia Turner, Kimmons' longtime partner and mother of his children. "The video they released was like a blurry version, and they cut it off.”

Along with the video clips, PPB released 402 pages of police reports gathered after the shooting. Most of the documents are transcripts of interviews PPB detectives conducted with various witnesses at the scene of the shooting.

A number of officers working under the Gang Enforcement Team report seeing several members of the Rollin' 60s Crips at the scene, and note that Kimmons was a known member of this gang. According to Officer Charles Asheim, one individual connected to the gang made threats to the police officers after they wouldn't tell him who had been shot.

According to Asheim's report: "[The man] said, 'If one of my homies is dead I'm gonna turn this city upside down. I don't give a fuck about the police! I ain't scared of any of you!'"

Asheim continued: "His openly violent comments seemed to be threatening the police as a whole if one of his friends had been killed by the police."

Another report from PPB Officer Torrey Streed details what may have been Kimmons' last moments. Street sat beside Kimmons in the back of an ambulance after the shooting, holding an oxygen mask over Kimmons' face.

"Kimmons repeatedly tried taking the mask off," Streed said. "When he did so, he said, 'Don't let me die, Bro. I'm gonna die.'"