“He lifts it up over his head, then swings it down, almost as if practicing.”
“Dark Pants has something in his hands now,” Curry says. shows them walking southbound, toward the sleeping Neal. The pair arrived on the scene at 8:47 p.m., then engaged in “back and forth lookout behavior.” Dark Pants came into view lugging the rock. Ovid Neal’s sister, Amanda Roth, calls it “an extraordinary tale of tragedy, every which way.”Īt a nearby hotel called the Timbers Inn, Detective Curry first glimpsed and obtained images of the youngsters she nicknamed “Dark Pants” and “Light Pants.” Eventually, she would draw from two dozen cameras to create a timeline of the night’s events. It illuminates tough questions about the limits of justice, redemption and forgiveness. The tragic tale demonstrates how our society often fails the most vulnerable among us, be they homeless, mentally ill, or neglected and abused young people. It’s recreated here based on interviews with 13 friends and family members, police accounts, court documents, five days of court testimony and independent reporting. The life and death of Ovid Neal III ranged from Harvard to homelessness to homicide. The victim was taken to Sacred Heart Medical Center, where he died at 10:08 p.m.Ī clue to his identity was found atop a parking garage near the scene: a cooler bag holding empty food containers and a criminal citation written to “Neal, Ovid - Transient.” “He comes over and he tells me, ‘Hey, there’s a bloody rock in that garbage can,’” Curry recalls. At the crime scene, Sergeant Tim Haywood paused while processing the evidence. As the lead detective, she wouldn’t sleep again that night. Two miles across town, at 9:45 p.m., a sergeant’s call woke Detective Jennifer Curry after an hour’s sleep alongside her beagles Arnold and Lucy. It was a tree-shrouded location on a dark night with no witnesses. Strewn about were his tooth, a blood-soaked ushanka fur hat with ear flaps, a Swiss Army knife, black boots, a watch, Yogi tea packets, matches and a tobacco pouch. emergency call in which the man’s agonal breathing could be heard, the teens were gone, the man unresponsive. By the time police arrived, five minutes after a 9:26 p.m. Within minutes, their paths connected, calamitously. Five minutes later, police say, another camera captured two teenagers “prowling,” checking car doors in a nearby parking lot. A bus camera captured his prostrate form next to a wall on Pearl Street at 8:39 p.m. On October 3, 2018, a 56-year-old man went to sleep on a green tarp, under plaid and camouflage blankets, in downtown Eugene, Oregon.