Man wrongfully convicted in Portland shooting at age 18 sues police, implicates 2 former chiefs

A man whose conviction at age 18 for a 1994 shooting in Portland was

thrown out

after another man confessed to pulling the trigger has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Portland and eight former officers.

The defendants include the estate of

Charles Moose,

who was police chief at the time and is accused of helping precipitate the mistake, and

Larry O’Dea,

a patrol officer then who later rose to lead the Police Bureau and retired in 2016

amid another shooting scandal

.

Danyale Gill, now 49, contends in the suit that he was framed by Portland officers for a March 25, 1994, shooting that wounded a man named Tommy Felix at the corner of Alberta Street and Northeast 15th Avenue.

The suit alleges that Moose had been driving near the intersection when the shooting occurred and saw a person hop a fence but lost sight of the suspect and while driving around the neighborhood came across Gill, who was walking home from visiting his uncle.

“Danyale Gill was an 18-year-old high school student when he was framed for a shooting he did not commit,” attorney Megan Pierce wrote in the suit. “He had his life turned upside down as a result.”

Moose, who led the Police Bureau from 1993 to 1999, and another officer, Mark McGlaughlin, approached Gill, yelling with guns drawn, and Gill ran away because he was scared, the suit says. Gill had “no idea that a shooting had happened nearby,” the suit says.

In the backyard of a house on Northeast 15th Avenue, police found a discarded brown, gray and white plaid shirt, and Moose later wrote in a police report that the shooter was wearing a black-and-white plaid shirt, according to the suit. The discarded shirt, however, did not belong to Gill, the suit says.

Police found Gill a few doors down near an abandoned house and Moose falsely identified Gill as the gunman that night, the suit alleges.

When police questioned Felix, the victim of the shooting, at a hospital, he provided a description of the shooter that didn’t fit Gill. He said the gunman was about 5-foot-5 and wearing a red shirt, black coat and black pants.

At the time, then-Officers O’Dea and Mike Leloff showed Felix a photo array of people that included Gill but Felix identified another person as resembling the person who had shot him, the suit says.

“Defendants destroyed and/or suppressed the photo array, including the photo of the individual that Felix had stated looked like the shooter,” Pierce wrote in the suit. “This exculpatory evidence was therefore never provided to Plaintiff, his criminal defense attorneys, or the prosecutors.”

Despite Gill‘s repeated denials of any involvement in the shooting during a police interrogation, a detective’s notes on the interrogation and Gill‘s statements were never shared with Gill‘s lawyers or prosecutors, the suit says.

Police also never tried to contact Gill‘s uncle, who would have verified Gill was with him at the time of the shooting, despite Gill providing officers with his uncle‘s name and phone number, according to the suit.

On July 18, 1994, a Multnomah County jury in a 10-2 vote convicted Gill of attempted murder. The jury in a 11-1 vote also convicted him of assault and unlawful use of a weapon.

Gill was sentenced to three years and four months in prison. Felix did not show up to testify at the trial. Prosecutors alerted the court that a subpoena had been left at his last known address, according to court records.

It wasn’t until 13 years later in 2007 that another man, Gabriel Chiles, admitted to shooting Felix and said Gill wasn’t involved. Chiles’ account was corroborated by another person, McKeever Thompson, who confirmed seeing Chiles fire a .22-caliber pistol at a rival gang member, according to the suit.

Gabriel J. Chiles Sr., who had known Danayle Gill, later confessed to the shooting that Gill had been convicted of committing. This was an affidavit Chiles wrote and signed, saying Gill played no part in the shooting, according to court records.

Court Document

With the help of the Oregon Innocence Project, a petition was filed in court seeking to overturn Gill‘s conviction. In July 2023, prosecutors agreed to dismiss Gill‘s conviction and all charges were dropped in September of that year, according to the suit.

Gill “was torn from his family and friends” while in high school and “thrown in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Pierce wrote in the suit.

Upon his release from prison in 1997, he became homeless, was living in a car and later was convicted in 1998 of a separate crime, attempted assault. While living in his car, he was stopped by police and fled on foot and shot at officers, according to court records. He was given a much stiffer sentence of 44 years for attempted assault and felon in possession of a gun because he was considered a “dangerous offender” based on his prior conviction, the suit says.

His sentence for the subsequent 1998 conviction was reduced and he was released from prison in October 2023.

The suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Portland, alleges wrongful conviction and a conspiracy of malicious prosecution, unlawful detention and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“This is not a case of detectives making a ‘mistake,’” Pierce said in a statement. “They knew exactly what they were doing. They knew Danyale didn’t do this, and they just didn’t care. Closing the case was more important to them than this kid’s future.”

City Attorney Robert Taylor declined to comment on the suit.

The suit, filed by the Chicago-based firm Loevy & Loevy, names the city of Portland; the estate of Moose, who died in 2021 at age 68; O’Dea, Leloff, McGlaughlin and former Officers Arthur Walgren, Brian Grose, Michael Kemp and Duane Smiley.

O’Dea was police chief from January 2015 to June 2016, when he retired after shooting a friend during an off-duty camping trip in eastern Oregon but didn’t disclose it publicly for more than a month.

— Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X


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