In his prime, Tom Hammond owned a successful office products business in Portland. He specialized in selling and repairing Fax machines — back when they were in demand, before the Internet took off. His business was so successful that Pitney Bowes bought him out.
By the time he was shot dead on the afternoon of Aug. 20, 2020 near The Grotto, Hammond had suffered a stroke that left him with some physical limitations. His car had a Handicapped placard.
He was a 66-year-old white man looking to have sex with a prostitute when he crossed paths with the drug-addicted thieves and hustlers who hang out in various enclaves in Portland. They make money any way they can.
The guy accused of shooting him was found guilty of manslaughter this week. Quentin Blackmon escaped a murder conviction. It was the third time in a year that Blackmon, who turns 34 on May 18, has stood trial on suspicion of shooting someone to death. Twice he was tried for second-degree murder in the death of Michael Epps, 38. Both times it ended in a mistrial (See “State vs. Quentin Pernell Blackmon” and “Second Trial Ends With Hung Jury.”)
Hammond’s death was characterized in news accounts as an afternoon carjacking in Northeast Portland. It was more than that.
The men and women who surrounded Hammond in his final hour are the kind of neighbors most people don’t want. In Portland, they are the kind of neighbors we are urged to accept.
The week-long trial of Blackmon opened with footage from a security camera, showing a clear view of the backyard of a home in the 4300-block of Northeast 90th Avenue. It’s a well-tended patio and yard with hostas, ferns, a birdbath, a bird feeder. The house is on a slightly higher elevation than the street, and a fence made of slats offers some privacy from the passing traffic. There are trees and greenery on the other side of the road, which comes up by The Grotto.
On this August afternoon, visible through the slats of the fence, a vehicle pulls up to the side of the road. Shortly thereafter, another vehicle also pulls up. There are voices. It sounds like someone yells “Look out!”
And then the sharp, decisive sound of a gun shot. Someone revs an engine and peels out.
A woman comes out of the house, leans over the fence, and yells “Jennifer, call 9-1-1!”
What the woman saw looking over the fence was what the jurors saw on a video screen within moments of Deputy District Attorney Christopher Shull’s opening statement: Thomas Hammond, on his back, arms flayed out, what looks like a Medic-Alert bracelet on one wrist, his multicolored shirt unbuttoned and open, showing his bare chest and a small red dot on his abdomen. The pavement isn’t level, his head lower than his body and his mouth slightly open.
With that image on the courtroom screen, there is the audio of the 9-1-1 call.
Caller: “I heard a bang. I don’t know whether it was a gun or a bang. … He’s on the pavement…. There’s a guy looking at him right now.”
9-1-1 Operator: “Was he shot? … Can you tell if he is bleeding at all?”
Caller: “I just, I just heard him make a sound … gurgling.”
The guy looking at Hammond turns him over, and the caller tells the 9-1-1 operator, “There is blood all over the back of him.”
9-1-1 Operator: “If you have a clean, dry cloth, apply it to where he is bleeding from.”
Blackmon, accused of killing Hammond, sits at the defense table in the courtroom and glances up at the screen, looks away. He’s a medium-built black man with his hair pulled into two, six-inch pigtails that stick out, one on each side of his head, giving him a comical, harmless look.
First responders arrive, declare Hammond dead and cover him with a blanket. Detectives look through his wallet, find ID, take note that his car is nowhere to be found. Checking state vehicle records, they determined the make, model and license plate of his Honda CRV and issued a be-on-the-lookout.
By midnight, officers spot Hammond’s blue Honda CRV at the Del Rancho Motel. At this point, the car now “belongs” to Jill Nevins and Ryan Pendergraph, registered at the motel in Room 27.
While Hammond’s cause of death was a gunshot, how he ended up on the pavement near The Grotto is more complicated. Twelve jurors and two alternates inside Courtroom 10-D listened and sorted out the sordid tale.
Testimony from Nevins, Pendergraph and Patrice Smith — the woman who drove Blackmon to what would be the shooting scene — revealed the disorganized daily lives of drug addicts, dealers, thieves, felons. They and their associates hang out at whatever motel one of them can afford or at a camp. They have cell phones but no cell service; their phones only work with free Wi-Fi.
“They don’t have plans or structure in their day,” said Sohaye Lee, one of Blackmon’s defense attorneys.
Studio 6 Motel, 4911 NE 82nd Ave., was one of the places where they often met. Stan’s Market and Deli, 5020 NE 82nd Ave., was another. So was The Grotto — officially named the National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother. But everyone in this group insisted that they did their business outside The Grotto, never inside. Farther away was the Del Rancho Motel, 7622 SE 82nd, cheaper than Studio 6 but too far to walk.
Portland Police Detective Ryan Foote studied 120 hours of security camera footage taken from various businesses, in parking lots and along the streets they traveled. Prosecutors and defense attorneys mapped out where and how these people’s lives intersected on the day Hammond was shot.
“Even though they all started out at different places that day they all ended up at Studio 6,” defense attorney Lee said.
Smith, a black woman with blonde hair, drove a red Ford Freestyle with a bashed-in rear-end and a red patch over a tail light. She had been in and out of various homeless camps. On the day of the shooting she went to the Studio 6 parking lot to let an unidentified white man in her car so they could smoke.
Nevins, a white woman, stands out in the video footage with her long dyed blonde hair, a sleeveless white top with spaghetti straps showing off her cleavage and wearing orange sliders on her feet. Her boyfriend, Pendergraph, is black and wore a distinctive ball cap and white shirt.
Blackmon, sporting a blue bandana, came out of Stan’s Deli and met up with Nevins, who had been arguing with Pendergraph. She needed a ride to Clackamas Town Center, and neither of them had a car. Pendergraph, who previously had been shot in the face and has a speech impediment, doesn’t drive. Smith declined to give Nevins a ride in her Ford Freestyle.
On the witness stand, Nevins matter-of-factly told jurors why she needed to go to Clackamas Town Center: “I was a booster. I would steal clothes and then sell them.”
Nevins asked Blackmon for a ride to the stores. She had known him ever since she arrived in Portland from The Dalles in 2019. He told her he had a ride for her, and she went up to her motel room at Studio 6 to get some bags. When she returned, he was talking to someone. That’s when Hammond’s blue Honda CRV went by.
The others hanging out with Blackmon also spotted Hammond. One of them — either Smith or Blackmon or both — called the older white man an “easy trick, easy lick.”
Security cameras captured Hammond’s CRV pulling into Stan’s Deli. Nevins approached him and asked him if he could give her a ride to Clackamas Town Center. Yes, he could. A white woman named Roxy who was already in his vehicle got out. Nevins got in.
On the witness stand, she insisted that she was not a prostitute. She was a meth addict. She testified that Hammond wanted to have sex with her, but she told him she wanted to do a line of meth first.
After leaving the parking lot at Stan’s Deli, they headed to a side street that runs along The Grotto. Usually, it’s secluded enough that people can go there to do drugs and other activities. Hammond pulled over to the side of the road, just below the slatted fence of the woman who would call 9-1-1 for him. Nevins got out to urinate.
In the backseat of the Honda CRV, Nevins said Hammond turned demanding. She warned him that she had a black boyfriend. (On the witness stand, in describing her life, Nevins said that women living on the street need a boyfriend for protection.)
A Ford Freestyle pulled up nose-to-nose with Hammond’s. In the passenger seat was Blackmon. The driver was Smith, who would later say that she was afraid of Blackmon, implying that she had to do what he said.
Hammond got out of his car and started to run away in the opposite direction.
Testimony differed on exactly what happened next. At one point, Nevins said that two men got out of Smith’s car, including a mysterious, unidentified white guy who remains nameless to this day. Nevins said the white guy approached her in Hammond’s car and wouldn’t let her leave: “Not now bitch. You’re staying in the car.”
On the witness stand, Smith said she saw Blackmon with a firearm, holding it straight out. When she testified before the Grand Jury, she said he didn’t have a gun.
What is definitely known is that Hammond, after briefly running away, stopped and — for reasons known only to him — turned back towards Blackmon.
In his various versions, Blackmon told police he never went to The Grotto. Or, he fired at the ground. When investigators interviewed him as a suspect early on and asked him if they had the wrong guy, his answer was a resounding, “Hell, yeah!”
Once the shot rang out and Hammond landed on the pavement, Smith peeled away from the scene. Blackmon got in Hammond’s car and drove off with Nevins (and apparently the unidentified white guy). They drove to Fred Meyer and McDonald’s and a homeless camp in North Portland where Blackmon got rid of the gun.
After the shooting, Nevins said she tried to get in touch with Pendergraph. For his part, just after the shooting, Pendergraph said he took a short walk, went to The Grotto and found a man lying there.
Pendergraph described him as wearing an Hawaiian shirt.
“He looked like a tourist.”
He said somebody in the house next door yelled, “Don’t touch him.”
At some point in his testimony on the witness stand, Pendergraph invoked the “street code.”
“You know the street code? I … I ain’t trying, you know what I’m saying? … Snitches don’t talk.”
What he didn’t want to talk about was how he came to purchase Hammond’s car.
While Nevins was accompanying Blackmon as he got rid of the gun, Pendergraph was playing video poker at Stan’s Deli and won $300.
Eventually Nevins and Blackmon were back at Studio 6. Security footage at the motel parking garage below showed Blackmon and Pendergraph meeting at Hammond’s CRV. Pendergraph gave Blackmon $100 of his video poker winnings and bought Hammond’s car.
With a car, Nevins and Pendergraph could enjoy the lower rates at the Del Rancho Motel without having to walk 45 minutes. By 10 p.m., six hours after Hammond was killed, that’s where they were.
“Nevins went from room to room at the Del Rancho smoking a bowl with the white guy and Quentin Blackmon,” defense attorney Dianne Gentry told the jury, planting doubts about who was really responsible for Hammond’s death.
Did Nevins or Smith bother to call 9-1-1? Did anyone?
At midnight, Portland police found Hammond’s car at the Del Rancho Motel. Nevins and Pendergraph were arrested on outstanding warrants for probation violation. Among Pendergraph’s previous convictions is being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In the trial that ran more than a week, the chaotic lives of these people were in contrast with hours of meticulous, sometimes tedious, testimony from a series of experts — forensic scientists testifying about DNA, fingerprint specialists, criminologists, a medical examiner.
At one point, Blackmon rubbed his face and rested his head in his hand as if he were falling asleep. He perked up when one of his attorneys noted that one fingerprint taken from Hammond’s car wasn’t very clear. But Deputy DA Shull reminded jurors that the odds of the clear prints belonging to Blackmon were an octillion to one. Or as Shull repeated, 416 followed by 27 zeros.
Hammond’s sons and his sister attended portions of the trial. One of his sons said the family had no idea their divorced father sought the company of prostitutes. While Nevins implied that Hammond was a meth user, the medical examiner said toxicology reports showed no methamphetamines or alcohol in his blood. There was the presence of anti-seizure medication often used by people who have had strokes.
In closing, defense attorney Gentry zeroed in on who exactly Smith was yelling “Look out!” to. Hammond or Blackmon? At the time he was shot, Hammond running in the direction of Blackmon.
“Quentin Blackmon is being warned to look out…,” she said. “If Thomas Hammond had been threatened with a firearm, he would not have run back in the direction of the threat. No one runs toward a firearm.”
Senior Deputy District Attorney JR Ujifusa said Hammond was a father, a brother, a human being.
“Everyone in the group thought he would be easy to victimize,” he said.
Only one person pulled the trigger on a 9-mm handgun and shot Hammond, and that was Blackmon.
The jury deliberated for three days. Last Monday, following a weekend respite, defense attorneys pushed Multnomah County Circuit Judge Kelly Skye to call it a hung jury. Prosecutors noted that jurors hadn’t always deliberated for full days. They pushed for the judge to tell jurors to continue deliberating.
The next afternoon, the jury returned. Not guilty on murder. But guilty on: Manslaughter in the first degree; robbery in the first degree; unlawful use of a firearm; unauthorized use of a vehicle.
Unbeknownst to the jury, Blackmon was also facing a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. On the advice of his attorneys, he opted to waive jury trial on that charge and be tried by Judge Skye. (As Portland Dissent has reported previously, it has become more common for defendants to opt for trial-by-judge on such charges to avoid letting juries know that they have a felony record and possess a firearm — especially in metropolitan areas where gun ownership can be unpopular.)
Skye quickly found Blackmon guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Blackmon is scheduled to be sentenced in the death of Hammond on May 23 — five days after he celebrates his 34th birthday.
Chances are the judge will merge the sentences to be served concurrently. It will cut down on the time Blackmon will serve in prison for the death of Hammond. However, Blackmon still awaits a retrial in the death of Michael Epps.
Whatever happens in that trial, Blackmon is likely to turn middle-aged behind bars. In freedom, his associates will also age.
When Nevins entered the courtroom to testify, she didn’t cut the same enticing figure on the security footage. She shuffled in, wearing a neck brace, having recently had spinal surgery. Her dyed blonde hair is now a dull beige. She looked 45 years old.
All of this bunch will someday be older.
Even Blackmon, should he live long enough, could eventually look like an easy lick.
Great reporting. I can't wait until more people start reading Portland Dissent and listen to Substack to get their news coverage. 😊
Excellent reportage. The DA's office is currently a joke. A complete joke. When Nathan takes over, he will show Mikey boy, in only a matter of a few months how the job is done. He's going to school him, and the community on how a DA is really supposed to operate. I can't wait.