Brian Duane Hill, 26, a Black male, was shot near the front of his North Portland home on the night of May 19, 1994, and died of his wounds on June 14, 1994. Just after 10:13 p.m., officers responding to reports of gunfire at 6435 North Gay Avenue found him gravely injured and rushed him to the hospital, where he fought for weeks before succumbing.
Witnesses described a man in his twenties running from the scene toward Portland Boulevard, then south on Omaha to a waiting car—reportedly a mid-1980s silver or gray four-door Ford Tempo with three other young men inside—which backed down the street with its lights off before driving away.
For years, the case lingered as a cold file, its fragments preserved in witness statements and the late-night geography of a quiet Kenton block. Detectives in Portland’s Cold Case Unit kept working the file, and by 2013 a Multnomah County grand jury indicted 37-year-old Marvin Lee Lambert for Hill’s killing after renewed forensic attention uncovered DNA evidence that helped tie the decades-old shooting to a suspect. Local reporting at the time noted that advances in DNA analysis were pivotal in reviving the case.
The following spring, Lambert stood in a Portland courtroom to resolve the charges. On May 2, 2014, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in connection with Hill’s death and received a 12-year prison sentence, a resolution that traded a potential murder trial for a certain term and a formal admission of responsibility. In court, Hill’s family described the long shadow the killing cast over their lives since that night in 1994.
