David Jesse Hortman, a 43-year-old male who was White/Caucasian, was traveling the Oregon Coast on August 19, 2014, when he stopped to sleep in his vehicle at Bastendorff Beach near Coos Bay. In the pre-dawn hours, a drive-by gunman opened fire on multiple parked cars in the beach lot; Hortman, a visitor from Walker, Michigan, was shot and killed as he slept.
He had been touring the coast after work travel and spoke to his mother the night before about finding a place to rest, unaware of the danger that would unfold.
Investigators quickly connected the beach shooting to violence that had begun earlier: the same gunman, 34-year-old Zachary Levi Brimhall of Dillard, Oregon, had lured his father, 58-year-old William Ray Brimhall, to a remote logging road and shot him repeatedly before driving about 50 miles to the coast. At Bastendorff Beach he fired into at least five vehicles, striking three that had people inside, then turned the gun on himself. Authorities recovered multiple firearms from the suspect’s vehicle along with “seal bombs” and materials consistent with components to make an improvised explosive device; the state bomb squad was called to secure the scene.
Notes found afterward indicated Brimhall had long struggled with mental illness and had planned to “kill a bunch of other people” before taking his own life. Prosecutors and local reporting described that he had camped out in the area before the attack and that Hortman was a random victim. Because the perpetrator died at the scene, there were no arrests in the case; investigators closed the inquiry with findings that the shootings and the suicide were all connected acts carried out by Brimhall.
