White/Caucasian male Daniel Davis, age 47, was found shot to death on the morning of October 24, 2021, inside an Old Town apartment building near Northwest 6th Avenue and Northwest Everett Street in Portland, Oregon. Officers were dispatched just after 6:25 a.m. and discovered two victims at the scene—Daniel Davis, age 47, and Ashlie Walker, age 37—both pronounced dead where they lay. Four days later, authorities publicly identified the victims and confirmed the deaths were part of a double homicide that marked a grim milestone in a year already scarred by surging gun violence across the city.
Investigators quickly focused on a man who knew the 47-year-old male victim. Police identified 45-year-old Michael VanDomelen as the suspect, and he was arrested and booked into the Multnomah County Jail on two counts of first-degree murder. According to contemporaneous reports and court documents summarized in local coverage, the suspect told detectives he had used methamphetamine repeatedly before the shootings and believed he was hearing voices telling him to kill. He later entered a plea of not guilty to the charges.
The 47-year-old male victim’s killing, paired with the death of 37-year-old Ashlie Walker, sent ripples through Old Town and beyond. The double murder unfolded in the confines of a residential building just off the neighborhood’s main corridors, a jarring eruption of violence in the early hours of a Sunday. In the weeks that followed, the case stood as one of the defining tragedies of a year in which Portland eclipsed prior homicide records, a stark measure of how quickly a life—Daniel Davis, age 47—could be taken and how decisively a community’s sense of safety could be shaken.
Public records and remembrances preserved his name and age and fixed the date—October 24, 2021—while official statements cemented the allegation that a friend became the accused killer. In the aftermath, the 47-year-old male victim’s death remained tethered to the broader narrative of a city struggling with guns and grief, and to a criminal case in which the suspect, charged with two counts of murder, awaited the long, slow course of justice.
