A judge on Friday found Joseph Kelly Banks guilty except for insanity for fatally shooting three men and wounding three others in random attacks in Portland in 2022 and ordered him committed to the state psychiatric hospital for life.
But family members of the men killed told the judge that the outcome didn’t feel like any kind of justice to them.
They called Banks a serial killer and said they couldn’t fathom how he could figure out how to acquire, use and load a gun but not understand the terrible harm he was doing during his deadly three-month spree while on supervised federal release.
“Make it make sense, people,” said Letha Buchanan-Holley, mother of 39-year-old Isaiah Hurst who was gunned down a block from her home. “Make it make sense!”
Banks, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was living in a Northeast Portland group home for adults with mental illness and had alarmed staff by skipping his medications multiple times a month.
Staff members had shared their concerns with his federal probation officer nearly three dozen times before the killings, saying Banks could become “violent and unpredictable” when off his medication, according to a pending civil lawsuit.
Isaiah Hurst was driving back from a quick trip to get breakfast at his local McDonald’s when he paused to let a jogger cross the street. That’s when Banks shot and killed him, a prosecutor said.
In the Multnomah County courtroom in downtown Portland, Hurst’s mother stood in the jury box, directly across from where Banks sat with his two defense lawyers and held a photo of her kissing her son’s cheek. Hurst was her oldest child and her only son, she said.
She always worried, she said, about one of her kids losing their life from an illness or an accident, she said.
“But I never would have thought my son would die this way,” she said.
“The person that did that — delusions or not — came with a gun at 9 o’clock in the goddamn morning with a gun out on a Sunday,” she said.
Hurst’s killing on Jan. 2, 2022, was the first in Banks’ spree.
Hurst was found in the driver’s seat of a brown sedan that had crashed into a tree along the 100 block of North Morgan Street.
Jeff Ramirez, 35, was in his pickup truck when a bullet pierced the cab and struck him in the torso on Feb. 2. He died behind the wheel of his Honda Ridgeline along Southeast Stark Street near 119th Avenue just before 4 p.m.
Mark Johnson, 55, was found fatally shot on the southern edge of Dawson Park next to his black SUV on North Stanton Street just after noon on March 1.
At Friday’s hearing, Johnson’s brother, Ronnie Johnson, described Banks as a “con artist” and called for the death penalty, contending Banks’ actions were “calculated.”
The men killed and their families were “failed by a system” that didn’t make sure Banks had the appropriate support when he was allowed to be released to the community into a federal halfway house and then the group home, the victims’ relatives said.
“A broken system let a serial murderer run freely on our streets,” said Traciee Thomas-Lewellen, Hurst’s aunt. “There’s no honor in a serial murderer getting nothing (other) than prison time for the duration of his wasted life.”
Banks, 52, wearing blue jail scrubs over a jail-issued pink T-shirt, sat stone-faced between his lawyers but looked directly at each speaker as they addressed him.
Banks previously had been found guilty by reason of insanity in federal court in 2007 after his second federal conviction for being a felon in possession of a gun. He had spent at least a decade committed to psychiatric care in federal custody before a judge granted his release to a halfway house in February 2021, finding he could be stabilized on a “regiment of psychotropic medication.”
He was last living at a residential group home run by Cameron Care Inc.
Defense lawyer Gregory Scholl said three forensic evaluators, including the director of the Oregon State Hospital’s forensic evaluation services, concluded that Banks had severely deteriorated and was suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations at the time of the crimes.
After his March 2, 2022, arrest, he was “completely deranged,” couldn’t communicate with lawyers or make any sense and believed that he was targeted as part of a “diabolical conspiracy,” Scholl said.
Any unusual license plate, someone’s facial expression or how another answered his question would set him off, Scholl said.
That’s what happened when Banks pulled up alongside Thad Thomas, 29, on Feb. 28, 2022. Banks, sitting in his car, asked Thomas one question: “Do you work for the government?”
Thomas, who was standing outside his car in the 3700 block of Northeast Garfield Avenue, responded, “No.” Banks, from the driver’s seat of his car, then shot Thomas in the left side of his abdomen.
“He knew what he was doing — the look in his eyes. He had a plan,” Thomas said, addressing the judge.
Thomas said he was thankful he didn’t lose his life and that the bullets didn’t hit his 4-month-old daughter who was in his car directly behind him.
Scholl said it took more than three years to reach the guilty except insanity outcome because state law provides “demanding criteria” for allowing such an alternative to prison, he said. Banks was not stabilized until he was put on the proper drug, Scholl said.
The families’ pain is justified, the defense lawyer said. The murders occurred, Scholl said, “because Mr. Banks’ needs for medication were not addressed.”
But Deputy District Attorney Eric Palmer said the case exposes a flaw in Oregon law, arguing that the legal standard to be found guilty except for insanity is too lenient.
The court can find defendants guilty except for insanity if it’s “more likely than not” that they engaged in the crime “as a result of a qualifying mental disorder” and lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of their conduct or to conform to the law.
Palmer said other states apply a higher standard of proof — “clear and convincing evidence” to offer such a defense.
Johnson’s family has filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government, alleging negligence.
Cameron Care Inc., the operator of the group home where Banks was living, repeatedly reported to his federal probation officer that Banks was skipping his medications during the six months leading up to the shootings and that they were concerned about his behavior as a result, to the suit.
Yet the probation officer assigned to supervise Banks never reported the violations to a judge until it was too late, never set a hearing to address his violations, never moved to consider if he needed injectable medication instead of oral medication and never searched Banks’ room to see if he possessed a gun as one group home resident feared, the suit alleges.
Court records indicate that Banks’ probation officer didn’t contact U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown until Feb. 3, 2022, the day after the second killing.
On that day, the chief U.S. probation officer John Bodden reported to the judge that Banks was a suspect in a homicide and that he had missed his medications on multiple occasions in recent months, according to records filed in federal court.
Brown moved to set a status conference on Banks’ federal supervision case for Feb. 7, 2022, which would have required Banks to return to federal court, but she scrapped the conference after Jeremy Corey, a supervising U.S. probation officer, told the judge that Portland police detectives were concerned such a hearing “could hinder their investigation,” wrote Corey in a sworn declaration to the court. Corey supervised Banks’ probation officer Kristi Sparks at the time and is now assistant deputy chief of U.S. probation in Oregon.
So Brown rescheduled a status hearing for Feb. 17, 2022. By then, the police were still investigating Banks, now for two homicides, according to Corey. So again, Brown cancelled a hearing but asked for weekly updates from probation.
Probation staff gave the judge updates on Feb. 18, Feb. 25 and March 1, 2022, that Banks was under investigation for multiple crimes and had missed his medications on Feb. 17, 2022, according to Corey.
During Friday’s hearing, Hurst’s mother repeatedly pressed to allow others close to her family to speak, not just relatives who are identified by law as victims.
That led Zachary Schomburg, a neighbor who didn’t know Hurst, to talk about the trauma of hearing the shooting outside his home and seeing Hurst’s car slowly roll into the tree in his front yard.
He said he called 911 after he saw the driver slowly move into the passenger seat.
“He was almost home,” Schomburg said. “It made me realize how vulnerable we all are. How fragile life is.”
Scholl told the judge that Banks was too anxious to speak during Friday’s hearing.
But moments later, Banks said he had changed his mind and stood up, surprising his defense attorneys.
“I feel your pain. I’ve listened to everyone here. All I could do is apologize,” he said. “I was getting through a lot of psychological problems. That’s the least I can do is apologize. Your loved ones … didn’t deserve this.”
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Katharine von Ter Stegge said she had to follow the law. She found him guilty except for insanity of 15 charges, including three counts of second-degree murder with a firearm, three counts of attempted murder with a firearm, and multiple counts of first-degree and second-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon.
He’ll be committed to the jurisdiction of the state Psychiatric Review Board for life but the board could decide at some point in the future to release Banks if it finds by a preponderance of evidence that he’s no longer affected by a mental disorder.
“The loss in the community is enormous, and it’s not going to end here today,” the judge said.
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