A man is shot dead during a burglary Dale Vincent Borneman, 47, male, finished a shift at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and returned to his South Charleston Avenue home in Bremerton on October 31, 1981. He often rode his bicycle home, a quiet routine that framed the rhythms of his life. That evening, as he entered the carport, he interrupted a burglary in progress. The confrontation turned fatal: investigators later concluded he was shot with his own. 38-caliber pistol.
The intruder fled in Borneman’s 1976 Ford Granada, stealing not just a life but the ordinary markers of a working man’s day. The car was later found abandoned near the Westpark area, a discarded clue that offered motion without a face. Despite the stark sequence—surprise in the carport, a stolen weapon, a getaway in the victim’s car—the trail cooled as swiftly as it began.
Public records preserve only the bare facts of Borneman’s identity and death date, confirming who he was and how abruptly his life ended. But the official narrative of what happened after remains thin. There were no announced arrests, and no suspect has been publicly named in the years since, leaving the crime categorized among Bremerton’s unsolved homicides and remembered chiefly for its grim simplicity: a worker arriving home, a burglar caught in the act, a life ended in the space between a carport and a stolen sedan.
Contemporary listings that summarize cold cases in the region echo this absence of resolution. The brief entries repeat the essential details—the burglary, the weapon turned against its owner, the abandoned Granada—and then end, as they have for decades, with the same unanswered question about the person who pulled the trigger and vanished into the city’s streets.
