PORTLAND COPS are investigating their first officer-involved shooting in more than a year—after a March 12 shootout between Officer John Romero and Kelly Vern Swoboda, a 49-year-old wanted felon who'd been suspected of tailing students with his van near Wilson High School.

Romero, a school resource officer at Wilson High, was among a team of cops checking out reports of a creepy van that afternoon. The bureau says officers noticed Swoboda's license plates didn't match, after they had stopped him and let him go, and went to find him again. Romero eventually found and confronted Swoboda—leading to the shootout.

Romero was hit in the hand and taken to a hospital. Swoboda died on the road where he was shot. He was wanted in connection with a brazen and vicious Oak Grove kidnapping attempt and several bank robberies—something cops learned after identifying his corpse. DENIS C. THERIAULT


MULTNOMAH COUNTY has agreed to pay $75,000 to a woman who says a county probation officer forcibly grabbed her vagina in 2012.

The allegations, first reported by the Mercury, center on Leslie Taylor, a longtime county employee who supervises adjudicated youth ["Do Not Touch," News, Sept 11, 2013]. Taylor earns more than $68,000 a year in his job, and was recently reconfirmed as a "lead" at the county's department of community justice, meaning extra pay and stepped-up authority.

That confirmation came despite allegations Taylor sexually assaulted a woman—an employee for a youth services agency that contracts with the city—during an outing to visit a mutual client in July 2012. The woman says Taylor harassed her for months prior to running his hand up her dress and saying: "I can tell you're clenching your pussy for me." DIRK VANDERHART