Neighbors, parents and community leaders filled every seat in South Salem High School’s library on Wednesday evening, for a lively, and at times tense, discussion of and safety following a fatal shooting involving students and an unrelated raid on a neighborhood home tied to a motorcycle gang.
Those gathered sought answers for what happened, and solutions to prevent it from happening again.
On Thursday, March 7, a shooting at the adjacent Bush’s Pasture Park killed a sophomore, 16-year-old Jose Vazquez-Valenzuela, and hospitalized two other teens.
In a separate event on Tuesday, March 12, police raided a home near South Salem High School with ties to the Gypsy Joker Motorcycle Club, arresting a Salem man, Wilson E. Voorhis, 48, and seizing ballistic vests and drugs.
Wednesday’s regularly scheduled South Central Association of Neighbors meeting was devoted to a two-hour discussion between community members, school administration and law enforcement about what happened in both cases, and what comes next. City Councilors Linda Nishioka and Vanessa Nordyke, who represent the area, were among those standing in the back of the room.
Over 100 people showed up, four times as many as a typical meeting for the association. Questions included the sequence of events leading up to both incidents, the feasibility of preventing students from leaving campus entirely and ways to help.
School policies
The most heated portion of the meeting was a question and answer session with Salem-Keizer School District Superintendent Andrea Castañeda, when neighbors shared their frustrations with the presence of students in the neighborhood and at Bush’s Pasture Park throughout the day, not just during the lunch period. Neighbors complained about some teens smoking and being unruly.
Thursday’s shooting happened around 1:45 p.m., when students were returning from the lunch period. The accused shooter, Nathaniel S. McCrae Jr., also a South Salem sophomore, had an earlier lunch period and should have been in class, school district administrators said earlier this week.
Some neighbors wanted to know why the school allows students to leave the building while school is in session. The school’s open campus policy means students can come and go during the lunch period, but students also sometimes skip class and go to the park.
“We don’t lock our students in. We work with them and we establish expectations, we make sure that those expectations are there,” Castañeda said. After the shooting, students have been asked not to go to the park during lunch.
Neighbors began speaking loudly over Castañeda and one another, one saying “we want them to respect the neighborhood,” which got applause from the room. One neighbor, in the back, muttered “then respect her,” to a friend.
“I love these kids,” one neighbor said when the applause died down, “Neighbors, we want to live here in peace and enjoy the kids the best that we can, but we have put up with a lot.”
“The stories you’re telling are true, and it is a tiny fraction of Salem-Keizer students. Our students are amazing – and – people do have difficult experiences, we know that,” Castañeda said in response. The superintendent lives in the neighborhood, a few blocks from South.
“We take full responsibility for everything we can, and there is more going on than schools by ourselves can do. So while I do hear how pointed and specific your expectations are, I need to share with the whole room that schools do a lot but we cannot fix everything,” Castañeda said, to some discontented murmurs and some light applause.
The audience pressed for more details, asking why the school allows students to leave the campus at all during lunch, rather than ensuring they stay on school grounds through security, by locking the exits, or by having staff patrol the neighborhoods. A few recalled a now retired teacher who would clear students from the park himself.
On the staff patrol question, Castañeda said every person on the district’s payroll is busy working with students in the schools.
On the subject of closing down the campus, school leaders said they want to be reasonable and practical.
Deputy Superintendent Iton Udosenata said they will likely make adjustments to the open-campus policy. They’re considering approaches like having 9th and 10th graders stay on campus, a policy used at other schools in the district. They don’t want to close the campus entirely.
“Our strategy, it could be that kids stay confined into South Salem High School at all times, and it seems right at this moment when we’ve had a tragedy. But in the long run it doesn’t quite fulfill the mission that we have to make our kids career and college ready and responsible adults when they leave here,” he said.
The majority of students do a good job of respecting the neighborhood, Udosenata said.
“We have 2,300 students here, and I would argue on any given day 2,295 of those kids are pretty good,” he said, to loud applause.
“And then we have some kids who make lousy choices, and we have some kids who make tragic choices,” he said. “And so it’s our responsibility to review what occurred and then start making adjustments to our practices, start making adjustments to how we supervise and start making adjustments to policy.”
Meth trafficking near South Salem High School
Early Tuesday morning, police descended on a south Salem home neighbors said is affiliated with the Gypsy Joker Motorcycle Club, arresting a Salem man and seizing ballistic vests and drugs.
Prosecutors charged Wilson E. Voorhis, 48, in Marion County Circuit Court with attempting to sell methamphetamine near a school, possessing body armor as a felon, possessing methamphetamine, first-degree theft and tampering with physical evidence, according to court records.
During the meeting, neighbors said the property had been an issue for years. The house is in the 700 block of Southeast Rural Avenue, across the street from a student parking lot at South Salem High School.
They asked Salem Deputy Police Chief Debra Aguilar for information about the arrest, and the future of the property. Aguilar said the property had been a “headache” for the neighborhood for a while.
“We had been receiving drug activity complaints for probably months,” she said. She said investigations take a long time, and a lot of the work to gather evidence is not visible to the community by design.
“We finally had enough to arrest the individual for quite a few crimes. And because of his past criminal history, we chose to use the SWAT team because it was safer for us and safer for the community,” she said.
Aguilar said they opted to make the arrest early in the morning, partly, because of the recent trauma of the shootings. She said they wanted the police cars to be mostly gone by the time students and staff arrived on campus.
What comes next?
One parent said she was encouraged by the school district’s efforts and transparency in the past week, and the engagement from community members.
“I just want to say thank you to these people that I love, who are educating my children, and I believe in you and I want us all to believe in you so we don’t eat each other alive. Because this is a problem that is nationwide, it’s systemic, it’s an epidemic, and it isn’t about small solutions, it’s about complex responses, coordinated responses and teamwork,” she said. “I’m asking for us to believe in each other.”
The room burst out in applause.
Several of the commenters said they wanted guidance from the city, police, schools and neighborhood association for ways to support youth in the community, and solutions to prevent gun violence.
SCAN President Victor Dodier encouraged people to look into the city’s Community Violence Reduction Initiative, which will bring together law enforcement agencies and community organizations to focus on preventing shootings, led by Aguilar. It held its first public meeting on March 6, the day before the Bush’s Pasture Park shooting.
Lynn Takata, chair of the Northeast Neighborhood Association, was invited to present on her neighborhood’s efforts to reduce gun violence following shootings at Englewood Park in 2019.
Takata said that it’s important to get to know your neighbors, and to engage with young people in the park through daily interactions and through events like the Englewood Forest Festival.
A major neighborhood effort to curb gang activity has been removing graffiti in the park, especially within a day of it going up. She carries a bag of removal supplies.
Udosenata said after school activities like music, art and sports helps keep kids engaged and gives them mentorship. He said they’re seeking ways to expand programs, and that Ken Ramirez, security field coordinator for the Salem-Keizer School District, focuses especially on at-risk youth.
“After we reel them in, we want to plug them into activities, those activities should be things that they’re interested in,” he said. They’ve expanded soccer programs at the middle school, for example.
One of the final questions from the audience was “What do I do? Who do I call?” The woman on the microphone asked for a coordinated effort, and a designated person in SCAN to do it.
She said the message of the night was clear that the police and schools need the neighborhood’s help to address gun violence in the community.
“Raise your hand if you’re ready to step in,” she said, looking around.
Nearly every hand in the room went up.
Related coverage:
Salem schools may get weapons detectors following Bush’s Pasture Park shooting
UPDATED: 16-year-old boy turns himself in, charged with fatal shooting at Bush’s Pasture Park
Community prays, calls for action after Bush’s Pasture Park shooting
Police identify 16-year-old boy killed in Bush’s Pasture Park shooting
“The kid died in my lap”: witnesses describe tragedy, mayhem as 3 shot in Bush’s Pasture Park
Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-704-0355.
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Abbey McDonald joined the Salem Reporter in 2022. She previously worked as the business reporter at The Astorian, where she covered labor issues, health care and social services. A University of Oregon grad, she has also reported for the Malheur Enterprise, The News-Review and Willamette Week.
