12/7/2023 0 Comments Undercover police cars pictures![]() ![]() “He was a great fighter,” Maurice Hopkins said. News articles over the years referred to him as a “phenom,” “Jolting Joe Hopkins” and “one of the classy guys.” He had a confident, aggressive style, said his cousin Maurice Hopkins Jr., and he was a crowd pleaser. The “country boy” from Texas made headlines nationwide for his boxing exploits, becoming national champion in his weight class as an amateur in 1966, then winning bout after bout as a professional. Joe Hopkins’ family had reason to be proud of him. He trained at Knott Street Boxing, Portland’s historic boxing gym in the Matt Dishman Community Center in Northeast Portland. Joe Hopkins was a national middleweight Golden Gloves champion the year he turned pro in 1966. To friends and family of the four who were killed, however, there’s nothing abstract or symbolic about the long-ago police shootings. The response to the shootings - a civil-rights pressure campaign among the most organized and coordinated in the city’s history - led police to change their approach to both confrontations and minority communities, while residents became more aware of their city’s troublesome history with race relations and more supportive of efforts to bring about change. But it would turn out to be only the first of four such shootings by police in a bloody five-month period in 1974 and ’75, each of which killed a young Black man or teenager.įew Portlanders today have ever heard of the three men and a teenager killed nearly 50 years ago, but they live in a city that was shaped by the deaths. The death of a young man in crisis was the kind of avoidable tragedy that alone could scar a community. 8, 1974, after a brief scuffle with police. Joe Hopkins was shot and killed near the Southwest 5th Avenue and Morrison intersection Oct. By the time Store returned downtown, her client was dead. After a brief struggle, they shot him in the back. Hopkins, formerly an accomplished boxer, soon left the downtown office, and cops caught up with him on Southwest Fifth Avenue. Hopkins even brought the homework she gave him - a list of his goals for the future and the things that mattered to him.īut that public-defender’s office employee, Solveig Store, had been alerted to the situation at Hopkins’ home and had gone to the house, unaware that he had already left. He’d then slipped out of his own house unseen and headed across the river for an appointment at the defender’s office with a young social worker, possibly the only person in the world he trusted. He’d just shot at a neighbor’s house in Southeast Portland half a dozen times, and he’d threatened to kill a cop who tried to talk to him.
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