Remembering Kevin Peterson Jr. | Portland monthly
[Top photo: Kevin Peterson Jr. on Portland Village School field trip to Opal Creek in 2010. Photo by Ted Katauskas]
A framed cover hangs on the wall of my home office, a memento of my years as editor of Portland Monthly magazine. When we were staging a clever (or so we thought) shot for our first edition of Best Schools, we hired a photographer, Andy Batt, to command a classic pencil yellow # 2 school bus and pack it with luscious third graders from Ms. Molter’s class at Portland Village School, a Waldorf public charter in which my two children were enrolled. This is my son’s class on the bus, so Willam (named for the river that runs through Portland) naturally claimed the center frame and hung out of an open window, flanked by his friends Aspen and Oscar and a group of faces whose names I name I don’t remember, except for one, all alone in front of the camera: the little boy with a massive grin.
Kevin Peterson Jr.
I last saw Kevin in 2012, the year I uprooted my family from Portland and moved to Colorado. Since unpacking and hanging this picture, I’ve barely glanced at these young faces that have frozen over the years and moved on from middle school to high school – many will soon graduate from college.
But not Kevin.
On October 29, 2020, Kevin died in a volley of gunfire while avoiding MPs from the Clark County Sheriff’s office. He was 21 years old.
I followed the story online from afar. The Oregonian’s report begins at 5:50 p.m. with Kevin fleeing from two Clark County Regional Drug Task Force officers who tried to arrest him outside a Hazel Dell Quality Inn. The story ends six minutes later with his bullet-riddled body sprawling on the sidewalk of a US bank parking lot, a gun that may or may not have been fired, packages of prescription Xanax pills, and an iPhone streaming FaceTime Video. In his last panicked moments, he’d called Olivia Selto, his girlfriend and his little daughter’s mother, and said with a gasp, “I love you,” shortly after a volley of gunfire rang out and silenced him forever.
I called Kevin’s aunt, Shelly Washington, from Vancouver. She told me her nephew was a bon vivant, which in many ways reflected the exuberance of his mother, her sister.
“I remember that smile, of course,” she says. “He was always busy, playing basketball or touching soccer and always doing something. He was very respectful, he didn’t get in much trouble, but when he did all you had to do was yell at Kevin and ‘Enough!’ Say. … He was a good boy. “
By the time Kevin came home for dinner from whatever sport he’d played or wherever he’d been, she’d burst through the front door and lit the room with that infectious grin, yelling, “What’s up?” Then he’d any hug each person in the house before sitting down to eat.
As he moved through life, that enthusiasm earned him a nickname: Splash.
I called Ms. Molter (now Theresa Beck van Heemstra, English teacher at L’Etoile French Immersion School in front of SW Barbur). The night Kevin died, she was on call as a volunteer shuttle driver for Black Lives Matter protesters when an organizer called to let them know that she was expecting a busy night because another black man had been killed was, this time from the police in Vancouver. Upon hearing the name, she called a friend who still teaches at PVS, where Kevin’s youngest brother is an eighth grader, and confirmed it was her Kevin Peterson Jr. Then she read the Oregonian’s first account of what had happened.
“It just struck me that they used the word ‘man’,” she recalled. “He is a child. That’s all I could think of I knew him as a kid, and that’s why I still think of him as a kid because I’ve only seen him a couple of times since he graduated from eighth grade. But 21 is still a child. I couldn’t take care of it. “
Kevin graduated from eighth grade at PVS in 2012 and Ms. Molter followed him on Instagram as he posted photos of himself in soccer uniforms and elegant wardrobes. After graduating from Union High School in Vancouver in 2017, he wrote a screenshot of his diploma to his former PVS teacher and said, “I thought you’d like to see this.” In late June, she noticed Kevin had posted photos of himself in whom he was holding a little girl. “You are kidding me! Is that your daughter?” He wrote back that it was and her name was Kailiah. “Happy Father’s Day!” She answered. This was the last time she’d interacted with him on social media until he posted a photo of Kevin from high school on Facebook the morning after his death (a post I last reviewed 965 times) with a moving eulogy which ended with “He left a little girl who will never know her father because his life was taken by the police in Vancouver last night. He will be missed forever. “
The family Kevin left behind reflects that feeling.
“He will never be able to walk his daughter down the aisle, see her graduation, take her first steps, and hear her first words,” says Washington. “It’s gone. You just took it. You set it up, hunted it and killed it.”
The night after Kevin died, hundreds gathered in the US Bank parking lot in Vancouver for a candlelight vigil organized by Shelly Washington. While an armed crowd of Proud Boys and Trump supporters sullenly watched from across the street, they sang his name, a chorus of BLM protesters, but also the voices of teachers – his teacher, Ms. Molter – and parents as well as present and former PVS students, including Aspen and Oscar, and many of the faces that beamed behind the windows of the yellow school bus on the cover of the 2007 magazine. Save one, that lonely boy, left of center.
“We’ll never know what it might have been like,” added Washington, who hopes to resume vigils and protests this summer. “I just want to keep his name alive … I just want Kevin’s name to ring so no one forgets.”