Sam Rice was always certain of one thing: Police officers were out to kill him.
“I would say, ‘Sam, stop talking like that, you know that’s not going to happen,’” says Susan Adame, a behavioral support specialist with SL Start, an organization that helps people who have developmental disabilities to live independently. Adame worked closely with Rice, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, in 2018.
“But,” she recalls, “he’d always say, ‘No, I’m serious. The government wants to get rid of me and the police will be the ones that take me out.’”
On October 10, 2018, Rice opened a bathroom window in an East Portland motel room that he was sharing with his girlfriend, Talon, who asked the Mercury to only use her first name. From the other room, Talon, who has a developmental disability, heard a loud pop pop. Rice, 30, fell to the room’s tiled floor with a single bullet hole in his head. He had been fatally shot by a Portland police officer outside the motel, who, informed by witnesses’ accounts of an erratic, knife-carrying man, falsely believed Rice was holding Talon hostage.
