Each of the following stories was reported and published in 24 hours or less.
A man carrying an AR-15-style rifle opened fire on innocent shoppers and killed two people in a Bend grocery store in August, a tragedy that continues to shake the small Central Oregon city. Through interviews with witnesses the following day, we reconstructed the chaos that unfolded, showing the horror and courage among survivors who ran for their lives.
This and the following stories about the Bend Safeway shooting won awards for best breaking news reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and best spot news reporting from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association.
A few days after a gunman shot and killed two men at a Bend Safeway, employees at a local convenience store grieved the loss of their good friend, a man who sat in the same seat and ordered the same thing every day: chicken strips and chocolate milk. To them, he was more than a customer.
Three months after the shooting at the Bend Safeway, The Bulletin obtained nearly 400 pages of police reports and video, revealing untold moments of horror and heroism. Within hours, we used these documents and video to show moment-by-moment what happened that night.
During a record-breaking heatwave in July 2021, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Pendleton reported an unprecedented surge in injured baby hawks. To escape the heat, the birds leapt from their nests and plummeted to the ground. It was part of a larger pattern playing out across the Pacific Northwest.
In the weeks leading up to Oregon’s largest rodeo, Umatilla County hospitals were full with COVID-19 patients. Health officials warned of another COVID-19 surge if residents and rodeo organizers didn’t take ample precautions as thousands of people flooded into Pendleton, a small community in rural Eastern Oregon that’s famous for the Pendleton Round-Up rodeo. This story, which drew immediate alarm from the governor’s office, showed that those warnings went unheeded.
As a far-right group and a local county commission candidate organized a protest against pandemic rules and masks outside Redmond High School, the FBI took notice and alerted local authorities. The event quickly raised concerns across this small Central Oregon city.
Nothing underscores the hazards of being homeless more than a frigid cold snap like the one that gripped Central Oregon in December 2022. As temperatures hovered at 6 degrees, a woman, wearing sweatshirts and thin gloves, shivered in her tent. Then, a retired couple showed up and did something that may have saved her life.
In February 2024, a Bend woman was sentenced in a drunk driving crash that killed three Warm Springs tribal members.
Two of the victims were teenage siblings, strong athletes and strong students with bright futures. One by one, community members stepped to the front of the courtroom in Madras to face the woman who killed them.