Five years after Brian Spaulding’s parents found him fatally shot in the home he shared with roommates, his slaying remains a mystery that seems increasingly unlikely to be solved as Portland, Oregon, police confront a spike in killings and more than 100 officer vacancies.
The detective assigned to investigate the death of Spaulding — a chiropractic assistant who didn’t do drugs, wasn’t in a gang and lived close to the house where he was born — left in 2020 in a wave of retirements and the detective assigned to it now is swamped with fresh cases after Portland’s homicide rate surged 207% since 2019.
