Garden Home - The Glenn family says deputies who shot and killed an 18-year-old also endangered his grandmother
Monday, September 18, 2006
MAXINE BERNSTEIN
Hope Glenn was frustrated because she, her husband and her son's friends couldn't seem to calm her drunken, agitated 18-year-old son early Saturday. So she called 9-1-1 at 3:05 a.m. for help.
She told a dispatcher her teenage son, Lukus, was suicidal, standing outside their house in the Garden Home area of unincorporated Washington County with a knife to his throat.
"When I called 9-1-1, I called to save my son, to get some professional help," she said in an interview Sunday. "Maybe I'm naive."
Minutes after Washington County sheriff's deputies and a Tigard police officer arrived and Glenn's son, Lukus, refused to drop his knife, officers fired bean-bag rounds at him. When Glenn turned toward the house, two deputies fired several gunshots. Relatives said the teenager collapsed by a doorstep. He died at the scene.
The sheriff's office did not say how many times or where Glenn was shot, but said the deputies fired because they were concerned he might harm family inside.
The teenager's parents and relatives Sunday said in interviews the deputies' gunfire ripped through the house and into the teenager's 72-year-old grandmother's room, barely missing her.
"I could have lost my son and my mom," Hope Glenn said. She pointed out two bullet holes in the front door and two inside the grandmother's room as she numbly recounted Saturday's events.
Lukus Glenn graduated this year from Tigard High School, where he excelled as a kicker on the football team. He had gone to dinner with a girlfriend Friday night and to a Wilson High School football game, his mother said. Later, he went to a party. A friend dropped him off at home about 2 a.m. Saturday because Glenn told his friends he was too drunk to drive.
His parents had been sleeping, but Hope Glenn heard him come in. She went downstairs to check on him and could tell he was drunk. She asked where his car was. He told her he "wasn't that stupid," she recalled.
The teenager had been down on his luck in recent months, disappointed about a long-term romantic relationship that had gone sour and unsure about his future as he saw fellow Tigard graduates heading to college. He had been working half-days at a Oregon Liquor Control Commission warehouse loading pallets but quit, his mother said. He hoped to start at Portland State University in the winter -- a former Tigard High coach led its football team.
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