A ride-a-long with a Lincoln County Sheriff’s deputy in Waldport illustrates why no day is a typical day

 

By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews

The phone calls to 9-1-1 reporting a man walking around with a rifle and stopping to aim at people’s houses came in while Lincoln County Sheriff’s deputies were at their morning briefing in Newport.  

Deputies Doug Honse and Zachary Akin wasted no motion as they hurried to their patrol vehicles and sped toward the South Beach neighborhood – lights flashing, sirens silent.

 Another deputy stayed on the line with a caller who could see the suspect and relayed the gunman’s location as he moved down Southwest Abalone Street. Honse and Akin parked out of sight. Akin grabbed his AR15 rifle and Honse pulled the 9 mm Smith & Wesson from his holster.

 “We had determined that I would talk to the individual, engage in conversation and commands and Deputy Akin was to be long cover to protect us both,” Honse said. “We came around the corner and saw him standing in the street with the rifle across his body, holding it with both hands.”

 Honse and Akin had their weapons at “low ready” – aimed toward the ground – when Honse called out to the man to place the rifle on the ground. Body camera footage introduced in court shows only 45 seconds elapsed from contact to the conclusion.

Start to a typical day

“A day where anything can happen at any moment is a typical day,” said Honse who now serves as a contract deputy in Waldport. “I would say a lot of the days actually are typical. Today has been one.”

Waldport, a city of 2,300, pays the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office $366,831 a year to employ two full-time deputies – Honse on days, Abby Dorsey on nights — to work a combined 80 hours a week.

Honse, 40, became a deputy just five years ago after spending a decade supporting and leading medical and relief teams into Third World countries and disaster and war zones before deciding to go into law enforcement.

Now he works four 10-hour shifts a week, beginning each at 7 a.m. briefings where deputies coming off shift pass on information about things to lookout for as well learning about any attempts to locate people.

“Maybe criminals headed our way or missing people,” Honse said. “A lot of people are drawn to the coast, whether fleeing or because of emotional distress, they are drawn to the ocean or the coast.”

Briefings can also serve as a training time – “We are training every day,” or a time for legal updates – “Laws are always changing,” Honse said. They are also a time for deputies, who spend their shifts patrolling alone, to come together and ask about each other’s families – Honse became a first-time father this year — and to joke and laugh.

The humor can be dark at times – reflecting a job where lives are laid on the line every time deputies put on the uniform.

“That’s important – it keeps us human,” Honse said. “The joking and laughter is needed to relieve pressure. A lot of tension gets released through humor.”

After every briefing Honse checks the gear in his patrol vehicle – the first aid kit, fire extinguisher, the tourniquet he carries on his vest and the Narcan to treat overdoses, as well as a weapons and a rounds check, each bullet is pre-counted to a specific number to account for “auditory exclusion,” something he experienced on that September day in 2021 when they confronted the man with the rifle.

Counting the shots

The man did not respond to repeated commands to put the rifle down. Honse called him by name – they knew who he was from calls on previous days that he was out walking with his rifle. Deputies had been unable to locate him on those days, but it is legal to carry a weapon in the open in Oregon.

“I told him a few more times to put the weapon on the ground,” Honse said. “But he didn’t respond. Obviously, talking to a guy who’s holding a rifle and may be mentally unstable is nerve wracking so we were definitely on edge. But I was talking in a friendly manner, using his first name. I was trying to be as non-threatening as possible.”

Akin joined in ordering the man to set down the rifle. But suddenly the man shouldered what turned out to be an old bolt-action shotgun and drew a bead on Akin who stood beside Honse. Akin opened fire and Honse, knowing he would be asked later, counted the shots.

“I heard five,” Honse said. “In the end it was 13 and he (Akin) was right next to me.”

 Auditory exclusion is a form of temporary loss of hearing occurring under high stress. It is related to tunnel vision and the slowing of time in the mind. And it is the reason every deputy has a specified number of rounds for each weapon.

 The suspect, who did not get off a shot, was hit three times in the lower body. The deputies handcuffed him and cut his clothing free in order to find the wounds and render aid until paramedics arrived. The man survived.

On patrol

After checking his gear, Honse drives to a side street off U.S. Highway 101 as it runs through downtown Waldport and parks so he can “run traffic.” It’s the term deputies use when referring to monitoring for speeders and other obvious infractions. Honse figures he gives out one citation for every 5-10 stops.

“It depends on the particulars,” he said. “We give a lot of warnings. We just want to get them to travel safer.”

While deputies are responsible for the highway as it passes through town, Oregon State Police troopers cover the Alsea Bay bridge and beyond. Traffic is slow on this Monday in September so Honse heads for Crestline Drive, which also receives a lot of speeding complaints.

But then the calls start coming.

The first is over a stolen bread box and an ongoing dispute. The caller knows where the thief is and wants deputies to pay her a visit. Then a call about a man in his home screaming every 20 minutes for the past five days and nights. The man is known to deputies and mental health officials.

Honse gets on his cell phone to gather information about the bread box situation, then calls the screaming man and asks him what’s wrong, how he can help and if there is something the man can do to calm himself. Then he calls mental health officials to see if they can do a welfare check.

Honse continues to Crestline to run traffic. No sooner is he parked when a call comes in that a student is pointing a handgun in the parking lot of Waldport Middle/High School just across the street. Honse is there in seconds. Soon another deputy arrives. The gun turns out to be a toy but the teenager is upset about the uproar it’s caused and deputies stand back as he screams obscenities and punches his truck and storms around in a rage.

By the time the situation is wrapped up, another call about a man with an illegally parked RV comes in from city officials. While Honse heads for the RV there’s another call that someone is breaking a stalking order.

“This is how it goes,” he says. “You never know what’s coming down the pike.”

If the steady number of calls were not enough, there’s also the hours of paperwork to account for all the incidents during a deputy’s shifts.

DUI investigations in particular require numerous procedural steps and paperwork and if deputies don’t include absolutely everything in their report, the case could get thrown out.

“Any hour of investigation or activity in the field turns into an hour of typing,” Honse said. “We just call it typing. I’m always buried in reports. I’m always trying to catch up on reports in between responding to calls.”

Bang for the buck

Some in the Waldport community wonder about the bang for the buck the city is getting for its contract deputies. But city manager Dann Cutter said it is still a deal when considering the alternative.

“We shut down the Waldport police station when we had over a dozen lawsuits and it was costing significantly more that it would be to contract with the sheriff’s office,” Cutter said.

The city shuttered its police station in 1998 and began contracting with the sheriff’s office in 2000. Its contract for services that year cost the city $188,000.

But that is not to say there are not valid issues.

“We express concerns over emerging issues and tweak the attention that certain issues get on a regular basis,” Cutter said. “For example, with school starting, we shifted their attention to some traffic and bus safety. As fall approaches and it gets darker earlier, we’re shifting their attention so some speeding and crosswalk safety simply because it becomes harder for people to see.”

In the summer, speeding through town due to heavier tourist traffic gets more attention, Cutter said. Then there are the roving petty theft rings that blow through town as they travel the coastal corridor. Recently there was a push to keep people from parking on sidewalks.

“We have a regular kind of ‘Hey we’d really like to see more enforcement of traffic,’ and then they show us the police blotter and we see the number of domestic violence calls, the number of child endangerment calls … and we acquiesce to ‘Well, that is certainly more important,’” Cutter said.

The only thing that officials get concerned about is the number of times deputies get pulled out of the city, Cutter said, “because we’re paying a third of a million dollars for them to patrol our city.”

“But when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you don’t ask where the property line is before you put it out,” Cutter said. “So, if something bad is happening, (Honse) runs to it. The challenge is we’re subsidizing Yachats, we’re subsidizing Bayshore, we’re subsidizing areas in the county and we’d like to see them pay their fair share.”

Honse said he tries to “protect the contract” as much as he can and understands the city needs to protect its investment to ensure its “getting the bang for the buck and the service” the city requires.

“But if there’s an emergency outside city borders, I’m gonna do that if I’m the closest officer or if another officer needs cover,” Honse said. “That’s just not a question. That’s how police operate. If I’m outside the city, say up Highway 20 at milepost 7 and Toledo’s busy, a Newport officer is going to come get my back. That’s how we operate, because it’s dangerous out there.”

Praise for job well done

Despite the challenges involved, Cutter had nothing but praise for the sheriff’s office and the deputies.

“We’ve got a great staff doing this work,” he said. “They are very in tune with the community, which is fantastic. They really have a sense of what’s going on and where the problems are. We recognize that as much as we’d love them to spend more of their time on traffic enforcement for example, that there is actually more serious stuff that happens in this town that they have to be working on.”

Cutter also had high praise for Honse, who graduated with honors from the Oregon Public Safety Academy, was the class leader who gave the commencement speech at graduation, and received an award for exemplary conduct and achievement.

“Doug is a phenomenal young officer who we have truly enjoyed working for us,” Cutter said. “He has been responsive to the city’s needs and has really helped us increase kind of a polite presence in town.”

Honse turns praise back to his co-workers and the sheriff’s office, whose motto is “Always to your best. Do the right thing.”

“The team here is incredible, really some of the most incredible people that I’ve ever met,” Honse said. “I learn a lot from them. Using non-lethal methods and trying to treat people with respect and de-escalate situations and all that, that is all the policy and culture here at the sheriff’s office.

“I’m just really impressed,” he said. “I got into law enforcement because I wanted to see positive change and see good people on the job, and man, when I got here I was blown away at the caliber of people that were already doing the job.”

• Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com