By The Oregonian
View full size Brian Feulner/ The Oregonian Night falls Tuesday on the community of Bayshore Estates, where police officers spent the last several days looking for some sign of David Durham. Durham is accused of shooting Officer Steven Dodds of Lincoln City.
The evening of Sunday, Jan. 23, Officer Steven Dodds of the Lincoln City Police Department was working 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Patrolling in his black, blue and white Ford Crown Victoria, Dodds was keeping an eye on the streets of the coastal city of about 7,400 residents when he spotted a 1984 Dodge Ram sport utility vehicle zipping south on the main drag, U.S. 101.
Dodds flipped on the light bar atop his patrol car and took after the Dodge.
» Update: Search for David Durham is scaled back Saturday
As authorities would report later, the SUV was registered to David Durham of Portland.
What follows is a timeline of events that rolled out over the next hours and days.
View full size Oregon State Police Police believe the man in this surveillance photo is David Durham. The photo was taken about 10:45 p.m., minutes before Officer Steven Dodds was shot.
About 10:45 p.m.: A man matching the description of Durham, 43, pulled into a convenience store and gas station in Lincoln City. Investigators won’t reveal the store’s name but have circulated a surveillance photo taken there that shows a man wearing full camouflage and a beret, clothing Durham often favored. The man appears tall and slim. Durham is described as 6-feet-3 and weighing between 160 and 185 pounds.
About 10:50 p.m.: Lincoln City police say Dodds began his pursuit of the Dodge inside the city limits, but by the time the SUV pulled over, the two vehicles were a few hundred feet south of the city’s edge. They pulled to a stop along the side of the road, just past ProBuild Building Supply and across the highway from Streetcar Village, an antique store.
Dodds’ cruiser was equipped with a dashboard camera. It ran as Dodds left his cruiser and approached the Dodge. He wore his uniform, including a protective vest.
10:57 p.m. (see location 1 on map): Neighbors heard four shots. They ran to investigate and found Dodds on the ground. They saw he’d been shot. Two bullets struck Dodds in the abdomen. One hit the iliac vein –which carries a large supply of blood –and did other serious internal damage.
Dodds, grievously injured, radioed in. Officer down, he said.
Within moments, coastal police and other first responders swung into action.
Medics, including Bob Duby, owner of the Streetcar Village, rushed to help Dodds, and police officers began to pursue the Dodge. As many as three Newport officers joined in, and at one point, the man driving the Dodge fired shots at them. No officers were hit, but a bullet shattered the windshield of one car.
Along the way, a videographer captured part of the chase. The Dodge, which appears a to be a dull green in the stark light of the street lamps, led the way, with patrol cars close behind, lights and sirens cutting through the night.
The pursuit headed south, continuing for about 30 minutes.
11:32 p.m. (see location 2 on map): Just north of Waldport, off-duty Lincoln County Sheriff’s Deputy Abby Dorsey was at home, off duty, when she received a call from a dispatcher who asked her to lay a set of spike strips across the southbound lane of U.S. 101.
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Dorsey, who takes her patrol car home at night to be available for emergencies, had the strips in place at milepost 153 within five minutes of the call.
The trap laid, she waited.
Sure enough, the Dodge soon appeared. It hit the strips, which punctured its tires.
Dorsey quickly pulled the strip so it wouldn’t deflate the tires of the pursuing patrol cars, and the Dodge continued on a couple of miles as the tires slowly deflated. It stopped near milepost 155, in the Bayshore area north of Waldport, about 35 miles from where the shooting took place.
The man who had been behind the wheel leaped out of the vehicle and headed west into some woods. A dog –who had been heard barking by the witnesses who heard the shots in Lincoln City — jumped out and headed east into a neighborhood.
Both disappeared into the night.
11:43 p.m. (see location 3 on map): A helicopter from REACH Air in Corvallis touched down at Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City, six miles north of the shooting.
REACH had been alerted by one of the PacWest medics working on Dodds and realized he was in serious trouble.
Jan Acebo, a manager at REACH, said that call was crucial.
“Drastic time was saved because (the medic) did that,” Acebo said.
The air ambulance, an Italian-made Agusta 109A that can reach speeds more than 170 miles per hour, waited at the North Lincoln helipad while doctors work on Dodds before loading him onto the helicopter at 12:16 a.m.
Pilot Alan Sisson put the pedal to the metal as flight medic Jeff Turner and flight nurse Kenny Nealy cared for Dodds’ wounds.
View full size Brian Feulner/ The Oregonian Aubrey Skinner talks about being shot at by someone while in his crabbing boat in Alsea Bay. The shooting took place a short time after police say the man suspected of shooting Officer Steve Dodds ran from his SUV a short distance away. Skinner has said, however, that the man who shot at him looked to be about 5-feet-11 and was wearing a tan-colored shirt and light pants. David Durham is 6-3 and was last seen wearing full camouflage.
11:58 p.m. (see location 4 on map): As police scoured the area north of Waldport with no luck, crab fisherman Aubrey Skinner motored his small boat out into Alsea Bay, which separates the largest part of the town of Waldport from the Bayshore subdivision.
In the murky darkness, Skinner and Phillip Norton were having trouble locating their crab pots.
Skinner lighted up a 500-watt spotlight to help, and that’s when he saw a man on the beach to the north. Then Skinner realized the man had a rifle and was pointing it right at him.
“I saw the flash of the muzzle, then I saw another flash of light right near my face, and then excruciating pain,” he recalled. Skinner said the first round hit a davit on the boat, breaking into pieces. A large part of the bullet hit his forehead above his right eye. It didn’t penetrate the skull, however.
The man on shore fired more shots but stopped when Skinner turned off all the lights on his boat.
Skinner also said the man who fired at him didn’t exactly match Durham’s description. While Durham is 6-3 and was last seen wearing camouflage clothing, Skinner described the shooter as 5-11 and wearing a tan shirt and light pants.
12:41 a.m.: After a 25-minute flight through the night sky between Lincoln City and Portland, Sisson lowered the twin-engine, turboshaft helicopter onto the helipad at Legacy Emanuel in North Portland.
Medical workers rolled Dodds’ gurney from the helipad straight into the ground-level operating room area. The straight-shot system is part of a design that Dr. William Long requested when redesigning the hospital’s emergency area. The idea was to eliminate blind corners, elevators and other obstacles that could delay emergency surgeries.
By 12:50 a.m., Dodds arrived in surgery, and at 1:03 a.m. Dr. Seth Izenberg started a laparotomy, the first of several surgeries that would be performed on Dodds.
View full size Torsten Kjellstrand/The Oregonian Lincoln County Deputy Clifton Cox and Newport Police Sgt. Ken Real worked the checkpoint at Bayfront Drive Wednesday night as the search for David Durham continued in the vacation homes near Waldport.
The next few hours –and days (see location 5 on map): Heavily armed SWAT teams flooded Bayshore Estates, Sandpiper Village and other small subdivisions that stretch from Alsea Bay Spit in the south, to Hidden Lake in the north, looking for any sign of Durham.
Meanwhile, residents were alerted by a reverse 9-1-1 call to stay inside their homes, and report any suspicious activity. Acccess to and from some 1,200 homes –a large percentage of them vacation homes or rentals –was cut off by police roadblocks. Cars coming –and especially those leaving –were checked for hidden passengers.
Durham’s dog, Huckleberry, was found about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, but there was no sign of Durham.
Thursday: Izenberg and Long held a news conference at Legacy Emanuel. Joining them was Dodds’ 18-year-old daughter, Megan.
The doctors said Dodds, whom friends fondly refer to as a fitness nut, had been upgraded from critical to serious and, with hard work, could make a full recovery.
Megan Dodds also spoke to reporters.
“I can talk to him and I like to think he can hear me,” she says. “He’s turned his head towards me and squeezed my hand. I’m really proud of him for making such a fast recovery –but there is still a long way to go.”
Related topics: david durham , lincoln city shooting , steven dodds
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