A Klamath Falls man who seriously wounded a Medford man Oct. 1 while deer hunting near Howard Prairie could be the first Oregonian facing felony prosecution for a non-fatal hunting accident in a decade.
A search of state hunting accident reports and court records shows that Cole Reeves is the only one of five shooters involved in 38 separate incidents in Oregon to face prosecution of any kind for wounding another person while hunting in the past 11 years.
In three incidents, the cases resulted in misdemeanor convictions. The fourth man had his case dismissed in 1997 after his insurance company paid his victim $18,000, court records show.
This case, authorities say, could be just as much about what happened in the woods that day as the product of a culture less willing to overlook harmful mistakes and more immersed in personal responsibility.
"The feeling from the public that I continuously see is that we need to be more responsible for our actions," said Jackson County sheriff's Sgt. Colin Fagan, who oversaw the investigation. "I definitely believe that was involved here."
Advertisement | |
And police agencies no longer call motor vehicle crashes "accidents" anymore. They are called collisions or crashes now.
While Reeves' incident was logged as a firearms-related accident by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the grand jury that indicted Reeves Nov. 22 decided his alleged mistakes that day rose to a criminal level.
"Accidents are something not preventable or avoidable," Fagan said. "That's not the case in this incident. This was avoidable. This was preventable."
Reeves, 36, disagrees.
"From my standpoint, there's no way it was anything but an accident," Reeves said.
Reeves, 36, is scheduled to make his initial appearance Dec. 14 in Jackson County Circuit Court on a charge of third-degree assault for shooting Glenn Bogart, 43, of Medford in the mountains northeast of Howard Prairie.
Reeves told police that he shot at a deer and missed, but the bullet traveled more than 100 yards through brush and across a forest road before striking Bogart in the back, authorities said.
The incident occurred when at least a dozen people were in the general vicinity of Reeves and Bogart, who were in separate hunting parties, police reports state.
While investigators believe Reeves could not have seen Bogart at the time he fired, investigators fault Reeves for firing without fully identifying what was behind his intended target — one of the tenets of a hunter-education course Reeves took as a child.
The seven-member grand jury indicted Reeves on the felony after also considering whether to indict him on a misdemeanor fourth-degree assault charge or a charge of negligent wounding of another, which also is a misdemeanor considered less serious than fourth-degree assault.
Jurors chose the most stringent charge offered to them.
"The question was whether the defendant's actions were reckless, and I think they are," Huddleston said. "This was a serious injury and could have been a fatality. (But) the recklessness wasn't determined by the result. The recklessness was determined when the shot was fired.
"I think the grand jury's decision was an appropriate one."
Grand jury members are chosen randomly from the regular jury pool, making them a cross-section of society, Fagan said. And that cross-section empaneled for Reeves' case asked many questions about the responsibility of Reeves and of Bogart, Fagan said.
"Often grand jurors ask me about personal responsibility," Fagan said. "Here, it was seven individuals who listened to the facts who felt that (Reeves) needs to be responsible for the bullet that left his gun."
Reeves declined to discuss the case in detail, saying only that the circumstances included "different variables" to theories about personal responsibility.
His attorney, Jeni Feinberg, was out of town and unavailable for comment, according to a representative at her office.
A conviction on a third-degree assault charge carries a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison and a $125,000 fine.
Since the start of 1996, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has received 38 reports of cases of a hunter wounding another person in the field.
Other than Reeves' case, database searches reveal that only three of those cases led to criminal prosecutions, and none included felonies.
The most recent case was 2002 in Umatilla County, where a man wounded two men and endangered two others while trying to poach a turkey, records show.
That man was originally cited on two counts of negligent wounding of another and four counts of recklessly endangering. He pleaded to the recklessly endangering charges and the negligent wounding charges were dropped.
That shooter received no jail time, had his hunting privileges suspended for five years, was fined and ordered to apologize to his victims, court records show.
Another 2002 case in which a hunter wounded another man in Lane County resulted in his prosecution on a fourth-degree assault charge, to which the man received a 20-day jail sentence and fine.
The only other case involving a prosecution was in 1999, when a Portland man was charged with fourth-degree assault for wounding two men while hunting in Crook County. Court records show that the assault charge was dropped and he was convicted on a wildlife violation.
One 1998 case in Baker County was originally treated as a third-degree assault but was dismissed by the court after a civil compromise was reached.
Reeves said he has researched hunting accidents and noticed a dearth of prosecutions as well.
"I looked into it and there's nothing there," Reeves said.
Huddleston said his office looks at all cases "on their merits." He declined to speculate on the grand jury's collective mind-set.
"I don't know if the climate is different now," Huddleston said. "Maybe it is."
Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail mfreeman@mailtribune.com.
Related Stories:
