Cody Custer Wallulatum, a 29-year-old White male from Madras, was rushed by private vehicle to St. Charles Madras late on Friday, March 15, 2019, with a gunshot wound and died before officers arrived. Police said the shooting had occurred earlier that night at a residence on Southeast Eighth Street, and the Central Oregon Major Crime Team mobilized to handle the case.
Detectives executed several search warrants tied to the Eighth Street home and named a person of interest who was believed to have fled to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. With the search extending onto tribal lands, the FBI joined Madras police to help locate the person of interest and others thought to have knowledge of the incident. Authorities described the investigation as active and released few additional details at the time.
Weeks later, federal authorities said they were exploring a possible connection between Wallulatum’s killing and the discovery of a man found dead on the Warm Springs Reservation, a development that broadened the scope of the inquiry beyond city limits. Subsequent reporting identified that Warm Springs case as the March 17, 2019 shooting death of Gunner Johnson Bailey, for which the FBI later offered a reward, underscoring investigators’ interest in whether the two events were linked.
Despite the early identification of a person of interest and federal assistance, contemporary accounts did not announce an arrest in Wallulatum’s homicide. Publicly available records and summaries list him as a gun-homicide victim from Madras on that March 2019 weekend, but do not reflect charges filed against a suspect in his case.
