Salem resident Bobby Brown was killed in a shootout with city police in 2022 when he was just 16 years old. As reported in a recent three-part profile published by the Salem Reporter, Brown’s birth mother used methamphetamines. When he was born he went into withdrawals and was immediately placed into foster care. He was adopted when he was 4, and later struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, despite repeated efforts by his adoptive family to get him help. Reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian joins us to tell us more about Brown’s life and how it reflects the gaps in Oregon’s social safety net and mental health treatment system.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Bobby Fletemier Brown was killed by Salem police in 2022. He was just 16 years old. Ardeshir Tabrizian recently wrote a three-part profile about Brown in the Salem Reporter. It is a story about substance abuse, foster care, mental illness, and the gaps in Oregon’s mental health and juvenile justice systems. Ardeshir, welcome back.

Ardeshir Tabrizian: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Why did you want to spend months focusing on this one teenager’s life and death?

Tabrizian: Well, I remember when there were two really high-profile shootings in downtown Salem within just a few months. And then finding out that this 16-year-old boy, who was suspected in both of these shootings, had been killed in a shootout with police, I just couldn’t believe it because this was happening in a place where people really wouldn’t expect it.

So I basically set out to understand who Bobby Brown was and how he ended up in this situation. And all of this was happening while gun violence and the involvement of both gang members and teenagers was really escalating in Salem. So I thought that Bobby’s story really represents how this kind of violence has spun out of control in Salem.

Miller: Let’s start at the beginning of Bobby’s life. He was born to a methamphetamine-addicted mother. He had meth in his system at birth, he was put in foster care and then adopted at the age of four. What did you learn about what he was like as a young kid?

Tabrizian: By all accounts, he was a really bright kid. He was very popular, had no trouble making friends. His adoptive mom, who was a physician in Salem, said that she would take him to the library. And he started off with animal encyclopedias and eventually worked his way up to memorizing all the Greek gods. He loved to draw and taught himself to sketch action figures. [He] was also pretty athletic and liked playing sports.

But it was in fifth grade, when he was around 11, that he started to get into trouble. He started smoking weed, became standoffish toward his mom. And she said that Bobby, by the time middle school came around, just wasn’t scared about things that other kids were.

Miller: And then about a year later, by the time he was 12, a family dispute was chaotic enough that police were called in. He was handcuffed. He was eventually released that day. A month later, you note that he attempted suicide. He was recommended for some kind of inpatient psychiatric treatment, but that didn’t happen. Why not?

Tabrizian: When Bobby was taken to the emergency room after that suicide attempt, a social worker at the hospital told his mom that there would be a long wait for in-patient psych treatment. So he went on a waitlist for a children’s residential treatment clinic in Corvallis, and he just never got off that waitlist. One big problem is that there’s a real scarcity of this kind of treatment in Oregon for kids. The state has 300 licensed psych residential treatment beds for kids, and that’s across eight facilities. But none of those facilities are in the Salem area.

That means that kids who need that kind of care can only get it by being sent out of town and away from their families, friends, schools. And oftentimes, they have to wait for months for treatment. They might need it a lot more urgently than that.

Miller: He did end up getting residential treatment of a different kind – four months at a wilderness therapy program in Utah. And then about a year at a treatment center on a ranch in Nevada. What happened when he got back to Salem after that time?

Tabrizian: He got back, he was in good spirits. At first, he was doing well, he was visiting old friends. He started at South Salem High School as a freshman, and he was on track at that point to graduate early. But things pretty quickly went downhill. Within a couple of months, he got suspended for taking Adderall to school and his behavior with his mom was getting a lot more intense.

Miller: How did the school closure of COVID affect him?

Tabrizian: I think, like a lot of kids, doing schoolwork at home was a challenge. And obviously, the isolation had a huge impact on mental health, even for kids who were doing well before the pandemic. So the impacts were even harder on kids who were already struggling, like Bobby.

Miller: What followed was a really fast descent into gang life, into run-ins with law enforcement, bouncing around various youth correctional facilities all across the state. A lot of this before his 15th birthday. What kinds of efforts were there at that time to help him get his life back on track?

Tabrizian: I think that’s a really good summary. At one point, Bobby was ordered into drug treatment in Portland, but he ran away, a couple of times actually. His parole and probation officer put him in behavioral health treatment in Coos Bay, hoping that he wouldn’t run from there. He ran again. So it seemed like juvenile authorities didn’t want to put Bobby in a correctional facility. They just couldn’t get him to stay anywhere else.

But within eight months of Bobby being in corrections, his behavior and his grades had really improved, and he was willingly engaging in his treatment. So he was moved to residential treatment in Bend for six months before he went back home to his adoptive dad.

Miller: And then, relatively soon after that, he became the chief suspect in two different shootings – those shootings in downtown Portland that you talked about. Can you give us the basics of what happened in these two different events?

Tabrizian: Around March 2022, Bobby met up with a few friends at the mall in downtown Salem. They were waiting in line for pretzels when this bigger group walked by. One of them went up to Bobby’s group and started challenging them, basically saying, “Let’s take it outside.” So the groups went down the escalator, and eventually Bobby’s group was inside. The other group was right outside the mall entrance, and one of the people outside yelled out, “If you have a piece, pull it.”

So one of the teens inside, who police believe was Bobby, pulled out a gun and shot at the other group and a bullet grazed one teen’s head. They all started running, shoppers ran for their safety, and part of downtown was basically just shut down for the day. Police told everyone in the area to shelter in place. A lot of businesses closed early, and no one was arrested at that time.

But three months later, in June, police suspected that Bobby was the shooter and they started looking for him. And right around that time, another shooting happened just down the street from the mall. That time, Bobby and a couple of friends got into an argument with another group at the transit center, and they all crossed the street to this parking lot of a bank. One of Bobby’s friends is backing up and he pulls out a knife. And a 20-year-old man walked up to that friend and pulls out a machete, before bullets came flying in his direction. That 20-year-old was taken to the hospital in critical condition. And again, police suspected that Bobby had pulled the trigger in that shooting, too.

Miller: As a result of that, police considered Bobby dangerous enough that they put together a SWAT team to try to arrest him. Can you describe the tactics they used when they closed in?

Tabrizian: The plan was to catch him while he was walking away from this house that he was staying at with a friend, or while he was sitting in a car. Eventually, Bobby is sitting in a car outside the house, smoking with three other friends. And that was when police moved in to arrest him. They were in unmarked, undercover cars and they boxed in the car that Bobby was sitting in from the front and the back.

One of Bobby’s friends who was in the car told me that he heard what sounded like gunshots and he thought it was gang members shooting at them. But they were actually police flash-bangs, which are used to disorient people.

Miller: What happened next?

Tabrizian: Bobby immediately pointed a pistol out the window and fired six shots and he hit one officer in his ankle. Three officers returned fire with 20 shots. Bullets hit Bobby in his head and chest and he died immediately.

Miller: Reading your article, it was surprising that Bobby was the only passenger who was killed. I mean, with four people in the car and three officers returning fire with 20 shots, it’s striking that Bobby was the only one who was hit. He was fatally shot. What did you hear about that from his parole officer, who had had a relationship with him on and off for a while at that point?

Tabrizian: Well, before the shootings ever happened, I guess the Oregon Youth Authority had issued a warrant for his arrest because he had run away from home. So they already knew that he was on the run. And when his P.O. heard that a teenager had died in a shootout with police, he immediately had a gut feeling that that was Bobby.

And sure enough, the next morning, he found out that he was right, and he told me that he had never lost a client before. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about Bobby and his family. He said that he still struggles to think of what he could have done that would have saved Bobby’s life, because when he let Bobby go home from juvenile corrections, he had proven at that point that he didn’t need to be locked up.

AJ said that as sharp as Bobby was, he just wasn’t mature enough to navigate the gang lifestyle, and that he was being manipulated and controlled. Like a lot of gang-involved kids, he thought that to be respected, he needed to be feared. But AJ said that he really wanted Bobby to be the example that a kid can move on from street life, because he had the potential to do that. And the two of them would spend hours talking about Bobby’s hopes and dreams. And he said that Bobby would have been great at anything that he wanted to do.

Miller: You spent several months reporting Bobby’s story. What do you think is going to stay with you most from that time?

Tabrizian: It’s a tough question. Like I said, by all accounts, Bobby was a very bright kid with a lot of potential. Not a single person told me otherwise. And I remember his friend told me that towards the end, Bobby was becoming fed up with bad influences, and realized that he was being taken advantage of. So he was saving money to move out of the state with his girlfriend and start a pressure washing business. And I thought that was pretty remarkable, that despite all this chaos and violence that he was involved in, he still had one eye on getting out of Oregon and starting a new, ordinary life. That will probably always stick with me.

Miller: Ardeshir, thanks.

Tabrizian: Thanks.

Miller: Ardeshir Tabrizian reports on criminal justice and public safety for the Salem Reporter.

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