Eric Medved woke from a deep sleep Thursday night to the sound of rapid-fire gunshots outside his brother’s home in the 7600 block of Southeast Henderson Street in Portland.
Medved, a U.S. army veteran who served in the Gulf War, immediately ran outside and ducked behind a bush in the front yard, still wearing his pajamas.
He heard “a scuffle and scrambling” of feet in the street and someone saying, “We gotta get out of here, man,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive Friday morning. Then Medved watched two cars pull out of Southeast 76th Avenue, a gravel road about 100 yards away.
“I’m fine, but it’s weird because as much as you think the military training doesn’t stick with you… I thought this morning, ‘Why the hell did I come out here (last night)?’” Medved said.
Portland police have said they believe a man who died at a local hospital Thursday night was likely shot on the block just before 11 p.m. When officers arrived they found “evidence of a shooting” on the block, but no victims or suspects.
The man police believe was shot in the barrage of gunfire that woke Medved arrived at a nearby hospital in a private car. The victim’s identity has not yet been publicly released.
Neighbors were out “gawking” Thursday night as homicide detectives marked about 50 shell casings along the residential road in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, said Coco Rallings, who was also in bed inside a home on the block.
Unlike Medved, Rallings didn’t run out to the shooting scene. She grabbed her handgun instead and took cover.
“I’m from Chicago, and I’ve never heard anything like that, never,” she said.
Rallings, a former cop who lives in Oakridge but stays in Portland on the weekends to work a security job, said police told her the shell casings were from an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle and a 9-mm handgun.
Rallings said it seemed the shooting spilled out from the parking lot of a development of about 10 two-story townhouse-style homes. There was a party there earlier in the evening, Rallings said.
Outside the townhouse complex, a house to the east was dotted with police evidence markers, and a silver Chrysler 300 in a different driveway was sprayed with at least a dozen bullet holes.
Rallings said she was on hold with 911 dispatch for six minutes Thursday night.
Everyone involved was “long gone” by the time police arrived 10 to 20 minutes later.
Home security videos from personal Ring cameras in the neighborhood showed two sedans pulling up together and parking on 76th Street about 10:43 p.m. and then leaving five minutes later, driving west down Henderson Street.
It’s not clear from the footage whether the cars are connected to the shooting, but Naia Luong, a stay-at-home mother who’s raising three children in a home on that corner, said she was watching out of a second-floor window and saw “two or three young men” running to the block and getting into the two cars.
Luong said she saw one man on the ground “who didn’t look good.” He was pulled into one of the cars.
“They had to drag him, like dead weight,” she said.
Friday morning, Luong’s son and some of his friends who live in the complex down the road walked to school together, less than an hour after homicide detectives left the block.
Two small pools of blood, slightly but purposefully covered by leaves, stained the grass next to the gravel road.
Another resident of the block also saw the two cars after hearing gunshots.
Katie Harms, an auto mechanic who said she’s lived on Southeast 76th Avenue for nearly a decade, said she saw two men getting into one of the cars and heard one turn around to yell, “Make sure you get that other (person).”
Harms said she was on hold with 911 dispatch for 7 minutes. Police arrived about 15 minutes later.
“It seemed like it took forever – we thought the police weren’t coming,” she said.
Investigators completed the initial phase of the investigation and left the block about 6 a.m. Friday.
If the man’s death is determined to be a homicide, it would mark the 83rd in Portland so far this year. The city is on track to surpass the record-setting 92 homicides of 2021.
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