In the early hours of October 3, 1974, the quiet parking lot of the Oak Hills Recreation Center in Beaverton, Oregon, became the scene of a sudden, focused burst of violence. Eighteen-year-old male Peter Zito Jr., of Beaverton, and his friend, 16-year-old Donald Bartron, both Aloha High School students, were found near Peter's 1956 Oldsmobile, the hood and trunk still popped as if their work had been interrupted mid-task. Each had been shot multiple times in the head with a.
22-caliber firearm, the execution-like precision leaving few clues and fewer answers. Public reporting at the time did not identify the victim's ethnicity.
Detectives canvassed the Oak Hills neighborhood for anything that could explain how an 18-year-old male from Beaverton and a 16-year-old classmate ended up slain under a streetlight. Within hours, investigators pursued leads that would later prove misleading. A young man named Joseph Amir Wilson was arrested and even indicted in the double murder, only for the charges to be dropped the following January when the case against him collapsed—a wrong turn that added months of grief to families already reeling. Through it all, the public record still offered no reliable account of the 18-year-old male victim's ethnicity.
Amid the early turmoil, another name surfaced. In December 1974, deputies arrested 17-year-old Steven Paul Criss on a theft charge and found a concealed. 22-caliber handgun in his car, making him a potential suspect. Ballistics testing of that era, however, failed to link the weapon to the Oak Hills murders, and the case went cold. The 18-year-old male victim, Peter Zito Jr., and his 16-year-old friend receded into a long silence that would last nearly five decades.
Two years later, in 1976, a new killing would become the hinge on which the old one eventually turned. After joining the U.S. Army and being stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, Steven Paul Criss used the same. 22-caliber gun to murder his commanding officer, Sgt. Jacob “Kim” Brown. Criss pleaded guilty and received a 35-year sentence, serving 12 years before parole. Decades after Peter Zito Jr.—an 18-year-old male from Beaverton whose ethnicity was not publicly reported—was gunned down, Washington County detectives revisited the evidence. Submitting the aging ballistics to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives led to a presumptive match between the Fort Lewis murder weapon and the Oak Hills bullets, a result that the Oregon State Police Forensic Lab confirmed—reportedly the oldest such confirmed ATF match for a prosecutable case.
On November 2, 2022, almost 48 years to the day after the shooting, detectives arrested 65-year-old Steven Paul Criss near his Aloha home. A Washington County grand jury indicted him on two counts of second-degree murder for the killings of 18-year-old male Peter Zito Jr. and 16-year-old Donald Bartron. Investigators also noted that Bartron and Criss had worked together at a Black Angus restaurant and that Criss had a reason to be upset with both teens—threads of proximity and resentment that finally aligned with the science. The arrest did not restore what was taken in that parking lot, but it gave the long-suspended story of an 18-year-old male from Beaverton—whose ethnicity remained unreported in the record—a name, a weapon, and a path back to court.
