On a late June morning in 2018, shoppers and staff at the Goodwill store on Northeast Halsey Street in Portland went about their routines, unaware that just beyond the edge of the parking lot, in a patch of trees behind the building, a tragedy was unfolding. Around 10:45 a.m. on June 29, store security called police to report a person lying unconscious and not breathing in the wooded area behind the Goodwill at 12250 NE Halsey Street. Officers from the Portland Police Bureau's East Precinct arrived and followed the path into the brush, where they found the body of 44-year-old Kenneth Lamont Coleman, a man later confirmed by the state medical examiner to have died by homicidal violence from gunfire.
In the hours that followed, the scene behind the thrift store shifted from a quiet corner of a commercial block into a full homicide investigation. Detectives documented the area, photographed the narrow trails where people sometimes cut through the trees, and looked for shell casings or anything else that might explain how Kenneth had ended up dead just a short walk from the store's doors. Crime Stoppers of Oregon announced a $2,500 reward for information leading to an arrest, and investigators appealed publicly for anyone who had been near the store that Friday morning to come forward. To those who knew him, Kenneth was not just another name in a police bulletin; he was a son, a brother, and an uncle, and his family took care to emphasize that he was not homeless, pushing back against any suggestion that his presence in the wooded strip meant he lived there.
For a long time, however, the case appeared to stall in the public eye. The brief early news stories—announcing that a man had been found dead behind the Goodwill, that his death was a homicide, that there was a reward—gave way to silence as detectives worked behind the scenes. It would be nearly three years before authorities said they had finally pieced together enough evidence to name a suspect. During that period, the file remained in the hands of the Portland Police Bureau's Homicide Detail, which the district attorney's office later credited for steadily pursuing leads until they could move the case forward.
On March 18, 2021, the Multnomah County District Attorney announced that a grand jury had indicted 46-year-old Alphonzo Johnson in Kenneth's killing. Johnson, who was already in custody at the time, was charged with one count of murder in the second degree with a firearm and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. The indictment alleged that he had unlawfully and intentionally caused Kenneth's death with a gun while forbidden by law to have one at all. Prosecutors stressed that the charging document was only an accusation and that Johnson was presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty, even as they framed the indictment as the result of years of painstaking work to find the person they believed responsible.
Later local coverage reported that the case ended with Johnson receiving a five-year prison sentence for his role in the 2018 killing of the man found behind the Goodwill, a resolution that suggested a plea to lesser charges rather than a full trial on second-degree murder. Details about exactly what happened between Kenneth and Johnson in the moments before the gun was fired have not been fully explained in public records, and authorities have not laid out a clear motive. What does emerge from the official statements is a portrait of a man whose life ended alone in a small stand of trees on an otherwise ordinary morning, and of a family who, even while asking for privacy, made sure to thank detectives and prosecutors for not letting his case fade, insisting that the person responsible be found and held to account for taking Kenneth Lamont Coleman's life.
