Portland ex-chief of police indicted in April shooting

Larry O’Dea, who has resigned, is accused of accidentally firing at a friend while camping.

SEATTLE — Forced to resign after he allegedly shot a friend while reaching for a beer, the former police chief of Portland, Ore., is now facing criminal charges and potential jail time for his role in the ill-fated camping trip.

A Harney County, Ore., grand jury indicted Larry O’Dea on Tuesday on one misdemeanor count of negligently wounding another. On April 21, the indictment states, O’Dea, 53, “did unlawfully, and by failing to use ordinary care under the circumstances, wound Robert Dempsey with a bullet from a firearm.”

O’Dea and Dempsey, 54, were on a hunting trip in southeast Oregon with five other friends. The campers were sitting in a semicircle of lawn chairs, drinking beer and shooting at sage rats running along a dirt bank, according to a Harney County Sheriff’s Office investigator.

There was “a steady amount of gunfire,” one witness said, when Dempsey suddenly began “yelling profanities,” saying he’d been shot. He was airlifted to a hospital in Boise, Idaho, where he was treated and later released.

O’Dea — glassy-eyed and shaking, authorities said — told the investigator that Dempsey had shot himself. The chief called it a case of “negligent discharge.”

But an Oregon Fish and Wildlife follow-up investigation quoted Dempsey — who was shot in the back — as saying O’Dea later admitted to shooting him. The chief had gone to a nearby cooler, and while reaching for a beer, reportedly fired his .22caliber rifle by accident.

O’Dea, who’d been chief for just a year, was placed on paid administrative leave, then resigned in June amid the furor over the alleged coverup.

The former chief ’s lawyer, Derek Ashton, said at the time that O’Dea had not been “impaired or intoxicated” and that “he did not purposely point his gun at any person and did not knowingly discharge a firearm in the direction of his lifelong friend.”

State police and the Oregon Justice Department looked into why none of O’Dea’s assistant chiefs called for an internal investigation and why Portland Mayor Charlie Hales — who early on learned what happened from O’Dea — initially kept it secret. It wasn’t until May that the public learned of the shooting from a report in Willamette Week.

The indictment, which carries a potential sixmonth sentence and a $2,500 fine, has been the only result of the investigations, though Hales did appoint a captain to take O’Dea’s place rather than any of the four higherranking assistant chiefs, whose lack of action was called into question.

Portland Police Bureau spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson says an internal investigation is ongoing.