Within five minutes, a family’s life changed forever — and not for the better.
Stacy Kenny was last seen by her parents on March 31, 2019, around 7 pm. A night out on the town led Kenny to drive down Olympic Street in Springfield.
Springfield Police Officer Kraig Akins, driving his patrol car without his lights or siren on, followed Kenny, driving a 2018 Nissan Leaf. This prompted her to pull over and stop in the 3200 block bike lane. Akins parked behind her, exited his vehicle and stood next to his patrol car for about 30 seconds. Kenny remained in her car for the same amount of time, then rolled down the driver-side window and threw a small grey sound-making device towards him. The situation escalated quickly from there.
Kenny exhibited abnormal behavior because her family says she had schizophrenia. “He had a really analytical, logical and mathematical mind,” says Kim Kenny, Stacy’s younger sister. (In September 2018, Kenny had legally changed names from Patrick to Stacy and gender to female. Eugene Weekly will refer to Stacy Kenny by she/her pronouns. However, some official documents refer to her as Patrick and use masculine pronouns.)
Kim Kenny says that while on medication, her sibling successfully managed her symptoms and worked as a mathematics tutor for over eight years prior to the interaction with Springfield police. Stacy Kenny earned two bachelor’s degrees in engineering and physics.
Barbara and Chris Kenny, Stacy’s parents, went to the Springfield Police Department several months before the incident to discuss Stacy. They advised an officer about Stacy’s history of schizophrenia and that she had not been taking her medication for about six to eight weeks. Though she engaged in odd behavior, she was not hostile or violent and had no access to firearms. This encounter was to alert the department “so that law enforcement would have situational awareness and react appropriately, were they to encounter him,” according to an Independent Critical Incident Review and Analysis conducted by Michael Gennaco, a former federal civil rights prosecutor and founding principal of OIR Group, an organization providing services related to police agencies, local governments and more.
After she threw the noisemaker, Stacy Kenny then made a U-turn and drove off at 25 miles per hour, the speed limit. Akins immediately called for backup, returned to his car and pursued. He turned on his lights and siren, then followed Kenny. She pulled over for a second time. Akins got out of his vehicle, drew his gun and yelled for her to put her hands out of the window and to turn off the car. As the window rolled down, Kenny asked why she was being followed. Then Kenny drove away again. Akins followed and Kenny pulled over for a third time. Three more officers reached the scene.
Dispatch announced on the radio that Kenny was on the phone with 911, but the officers claimed they did not hear it.
“Akins, joined by Springfield Police Sgt. Richard ‘R.A.’ Lewis and Springfield Officers Robert Rosales and Robert Conrad, broke out the driver and passenger windows of Patrick Kenny’s vehicle, grabbed Mr. Kenny by his hair, clothing and arms, struck Mr. Kenny multiple times in the head and face with fists and shot Mr. Kenny with Tasers in his abdomen, groin and the left side of his back,” according to the amended complaint brought to the United States District Court for the District of Oregon Eugene Division by the Kenny family.
After Akins broke the windows, Kenny sounded an air horn. Akins and Conrad fired their Tasers at Kenny repeatedly. Then Lewis entered the passenger side and escalated the physical assault by punching her three or more times. Kenny then shifted the gear into drive and accelerated toward a row of trees. Lewis fired his gun six times, shooting Kenny three times in the torso and twice in her head.
Stacy Kenny pulled over the first time at approximately 8:52:56 pm and five minutes later, she was dead. Her family is left with a lost loved one forever.
The Kenny family is not alone. Oregon, Washington and a few California families who have lost loved ones to police violence joined the all-volunteer organization Pacific Northwest Family Circle for support. The organization seeks to help families heal from their grief and to empower them to seek police accountability, if needed.
Barbara Kenny reflects on what happened to her child and how she copes by connecting with the PNWFC. It was one way she grieved, and it allowed her to meet others who had experienced similar trauma. And her involvement led her to be named the second elected PNWFC president in May 2024.
“For every one that dies, they leave a family behind,” Barbara Kenny says.
A number of local families have recently been left behind. March 31 is the sixth anniversary of Stacy Kenny’s death. Chase Brooks was killed by Springfield police March 14, 2020. Landon Payne died March 19, 2020 after being arrested and Tased by Eugene police and restrained and kneeled on by Lane County law enforcement. In 2020, Stacy Kenny’s family settled with Springfield police for $4.5 million. Lawsuits in Payne’s and Brooks’ deaths are in the courts.
Demanding Action
The PNWFC is not an anti-police organization. It’s a group composed mostly of women who demand action.
The same year Stacy Kenny was killed, five officer-involved shootings occurred in Lane County. Last year, three people were killed by police shootings, according to the Lane County District Attorney’s website.
On Dec. 27, 2024, SWAT team officers from Lane County Sheriff’s Office and Oregon State Police shot and killed Tyler Holloway in Tidewater after law enforcement was called in for aid after another man was shot. On Nov. 26, 2024, Eugene police fatally shot Guy Cruz Jr., a fugitive from Washington state. On June 11, 2024, Timothy Wells was fatally shot by Oregon State troopers during a traffic stop in Eugene. In all three cases, the district attorney’s office found the shootings justified. Holloway’s mother has filed an intent to sue over his death.
Police kill an average of 1,000 people each year, according to The Washington Post’s ongoing analysis tracking fatal police shootings in the U.S. since 2015. The police have shot and killed 10,429 people from 2015 to 2024. In Oregon, 16 people lost their lives at the hands of police officers from January 2024 to January 2025, and the police have killed 166 people in Oregon since January 2015.
Researchers have studied the response and reactions of those who lost their loved ones to police killings.
Kristofer Rounsville, a New York mental health councilor, researcher and author wrote in an email that he and his co-authors were driven to talk with families, friends and loved ones of children who had lost their lives to the police to make some meaning out of the incredibly high number of police killings and to humanize the victims.
They concluded that the families faced mental, emotional and social challenges surrounding their experience, including living with trauma and dealing with the meaning of state violence, holding police accountable, and limited resources and support following police killings. Rounseville and his co-authors described their findings in a 2020 issue of Current Psychology.
“It was common that the families, friends and loved ones were not followed up with or provided with help and support afterward,” Rounsville says of the interviews he and his co-authors conducted. “Many of the family members and loved ones would break down into tears while recounting what it was like to lose their loved one, a child, to police violence. Many people indicated that the police went to unethical levels to rationalize and excuse the use of deadly violence against children.”
Rounseville says the killings left family members feeling bitter, resentful, angry and traumatized.
“There’s the trauma of losing your loved one suddenly and in a violent fashion,” Barbara Kenny says. “And there’s the additional trauma in processing the fact that our society thinks it is OK for a public official to kill your loved one and suffer no consequences.”
The Kennys
Barbara’s two kids grew up in a small town in Ohio and shared a love for chess and eclipses. The Kennys moved to Oregon where Barbara’s in-laws lived, and because it’s a beautiful state with tons of outdoorsy activities, she says.
Stacy’s sister, Kim, is an Oregon State University grad with a master’s degree from Stanford in journalism. She’s now a science videographer and digital content specialist at OSU. Barbara was an electrical engineer, and her husband, Chris, was a mechanical engineer.
Now retired, Chris is a scuba diver instructor who finds peace in the water, and Barbara annually leads a team reviewing university engineering programs. Occasionally, she’s sat on merit review boards evaluating proposals and making funding recommendations for the National Science Foundation. But she’s also spent the last six years grieving her child’s death and creating awareness.
Barbara reaches out to people who’ve lost a loved one to police violence to support them and introduce them to Pacific Northwest Family Circle, where everyone’s experience is heard and valid.
“So many of us have found a lot of comfort in talking to others with similar experiences, and then helping newly bereaved families try and cope with what they are experiencing so they know they are not alone,” Barbara says.
About six months after Stacy’s death, she joined PNWFC. The group invited her to bring a photo of her loved one to Stephanie Babb’s gathering. Stephanie’s brother, Brian Babb, was killed 10 years ago March 30 by Eugene police officers. In his case, it was 45 minutes between the call that the Army National Guard veteran who served in Afghanistan made to his therapist because he was feeling suicidal to his being shot and killed by the police after the therapist called 911 to help him.
“That was the first time I had met anybody who had also suffered a loss to the police,” Barbara says.
She has hosted similar gatherings at her home in Springfield. For her first meeting in 2023, she set out a bowl of water and bought little flower-floating candles. One by one, local members of PNWFC lit a candle. They spoke about their loved one and laid it in the bowl.
“It gave everybody an opportunity to speak about their loved one in a circle of people,” Barbara Kenny recalls from the first time doing the ceremony. “It’s a comfortable space in a circle of people that really listen.” Since then, she’s hosted a few more in-person events every year for the local members.
Pacific Northwest Family Circle
The group originally came together about nine years ago to support one another and remember those who were killed by law enforcement. Irene Kalonji and Shiloh Wilson-Phelps made it all possible. Irene lost her son Christopher Kalonji and Wilson-Phelps lost her son Bodhi Phelps within four months of each other.
One day, Irene listened to the news: the Gresham police had killed a 22-year-old man, Bodhi Phelps. “I feel this pain again,” she recalls in a 2020 MetroEast Community Media interview. “I say to myself I need to meet this family. I need to talk to his mom because I exactly know how she is feeling.”
“My son was killed on May 24, 2016,” Wilson-Phelps says. “I felt really alone because nobody knows what to do.”
Irene Kalonji then went to her son’s grave to let him know a new angel — Bodhi — would come to him. She remembers saying that she wanted to speak to his mom.
As soon as she got home, her phone buzzed with a message from Wilson-Phelps saying that she knew about Christopher and that they needed to meet. “We sit. We cry. We talk. We find many things the same about our sons,” Kalonji says.
Kalonji and Wilson-Phelps met with Donna Hayes, the grandmother of Quanice (Moose) Hayes who was killed by Portland police in 2017. After bouncing ideas off of one another, Wilson-Phelps recalls thinking they should form a group.
The organization grew, and so did its advocacy. The PNWFC partnered with Showing Up for Racial Justice PDX Black Lives Matter Action Group in 2017 to create Oregon DA for the People, educating voters about the district attorney’s power.
“Telling our story, we humanize our loved ones. We let people know what’s going on in reality,” Kalonji says.
Other mothers have banded together similarly. Around 2017, women from Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights and East L.A. in California gathered after losing their sons to police violence, according to a 2020 Los Angeles Times article. And Mothers Against Police Brutality was founded by a mother whose son was shot and killed by a Dallas, Texas, police officer. The intergenerational, multi-ethnic and multicultural organization tries to keep the Dallas police chief and department accountable and advocates on a national level to seek justice.
Campaign Zero, like PNWFC, brings people together and connects them with resources. It began in 2015 after the protests about the police killing of an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The research-based organization launched advocacy projects to understand public safety beyond policing. The Police Brutality Center is another organization, which provides legal help and resources to victims in numerous cities including Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans and more.
“In my involvement with families, one of the chief complaints is that police departments take this sort of circle-the-wagons approach to families in crisis,” says Scott McKee, former Eugene and Springfield police officer and internal affairs investigator. “What I kind of characterize as the golden rule of policing is to treat people and families in these situations the way you would hope the police would treat you or your family if you or somebody in your family was killed as a result of a law enforcement intervention.”
McKee says when a law enforcement officer uses deadly force, the Interagency Deadly Force Investigation Team (IDFIT), a group of investigators from agencies around the area and from the agency where the officer is employed, conducts a criminal investigation. The team interviews witnesses and collects evidence similar to any other criminal case. The officer or officers involved surrender their weapons, are placed on paid administrative leave and aren’t allowed to partake in any policing during the investigation. The officers have the option to make a statement about what happened, but they are allowed to wait 48 hours after the incident.
After the investigation, the district attorney decides whether the deadly force was lawful.
“It is worth noting that if an officer kills someone, generally they are at least offered, if not required to attend, mental health counseling to cope with the fact that they have taken a life,” Barbara Kenny says. “On the other hand, family members are left with nothing, we aren’t even given a list of counseling services that we could pursue at our own expense.”
Officers are offered a minimum of two mental health counseling opportunities within six months after the use of deadly physical force incident, according to the IDFIT Deadly Physical Force Plan.
Citizens can make a complaint to local organizations if they see or experience police misconduct.
Eugene’s Independent Police Auditor Office investigates complaints from within the Eugene Police Department, community members or a third party about EPD employee misconduct.
“We can participate in the investigations into those complaints, including a review of all the records that are generated, and also participate in any investigatory interviews, and then we provide to the chief what’s called an adjudication recommendation,” says Lindsey Foltz, associate police auditor.
Eugene’s Civilian Review Board, a group of citizens appointed by the City Council, reviews the work of the auditor’s office and reviews allegations of misconduct. The Eugene Police Commission declined to comment for this story.
“A theme that I’ve observed in several of these deadly force cases is that police tend to create exigency by getting too close, too fast, closing in on somebody who’s in crisis,” McKee says. “Many times, no matter what the nature of the crisis might be, that can tend to escalate circumstances.”
He continues, “I think police utilize and should utilize the outcomes of those incidents to try to figure out how on earth we can avoid a similar crisis in the future.”
PNWFC members have expressed the difficulty of talking with others who haven’t lost someone to police violence because of implicit bias. Often people link the violence to race or think that those killed did something wrong to provoke the escalation — but that is not always the case.
Every third Saturday of the month, PNWFC hosts a Zoom meeting for the members who have lost a loved one to a police killing or just support group members.
During one meeting last spring, 10 frames appeared on the screen. Of the PNWFC members who joined that Zoom meeting, three were mothers who lost a child, one lost her husband, one was a survivor of police shootings and five were supporters.
One by one, family members told their stories. “After my son got killed, life changed for my family,” Irene Kalonji began. The first thing her family thought was that they were alone, but then they realized they weren’t. She then briefly discusses creating the group with Wilson-Phelps.
Their first goal was to just sit with family in their grief after they’ve experienced a loved one dying, she says.
Kalonji chose Barbara Kenny to go next. “There’s a certain bonding, it’s unfortunate, but the kind of things we can talk about with each other aren’t the kind of things that most people would understand,” Kenny says.
April Sabbe starts the story of her husband, Remi’s, death by saying, “When you lose a loved one, your life changes. And I do feel that a piece of my heart died that day. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.” She continues, “There’s not many family members in this group who have lost husbands, it’s mostly children.”
A member who lost her son and currently has a case against a law enforcement agency says, “And I really don’t know what else to say except for, you know, it’s a horrible thing that they can just shoot people. And get away with it like that.”
After all the family members who lost a loved one introduce themselves, the people who haven’t lost anyone to police killings, but support the group begin their introductions. One joined in 2019 through the Oregon DA for the People campaign. Another joined because of their connection to Irene Kalonji’s story. They went to the same high school as Kalonji’s son. A chapter leader from Clackamas County’s Showing Up For Racial Justice group became a supporter after meeting Kalonji.
The Advocacy of the PNWFC
Barbara Kenny and her family have tabled at events, such as the annual June Wear Orange event orchestrated by Moms Demand Action creating awareness around gun violence in 2023 and 2024. Orange is the color hunters wear to protect themselves from being shot.
On the state level, Kenny was invited to testify before a subcommittee of the Oregon Legislature, the Joint Committee on Transparent Policing and Use of Force Reform, looking into what could be done in response to George Floyd’s killing in 2020. Also, she and April Sabbe offered public comment in front of the Tigard City Council along with Maria Macduff whose son, Jacob, was killed by Tigard police in 2021.
In November 2023, Baraba and Kim Kenny made a 90-minute facilitated presentation at the annual National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) meeting about police accountability. The next year, Barbara was awarded the 2024 NACOLE Contribution to Oversight award.
“The trick is to not forget,” Barbara says. “It’s important for people to continue to be engaged and just keep putting out the message that this is still something we care about, and it’s still important to the community.”
At the end of each monthly PNWFC Zoom meeting, they play a slideshow. One by one, the loved ones who were killed appear on the screen with their name, age, date of their killing, what police killed them and often a photo. After each loved one, the group repeats, “We remember you.” There are a few loved ones mentioned who the police attempted to kill and were not successful. After those names are said, the group repeats, “We support you.”
Stacy Kenny, “We remember you.” Bodhi Phelps, “We remember you.” Christopher Kalonji, “We remember you.” Chase Brooks, “We remember you.” Landon Payne, “We remember you.” Tyler Holloway, “We remember you.” Guy Cruz Jr., “We remember you.” Timothy Wells, “We remember you.” Remi Sabbe, “We remember you.” Jacob Macduff, “We remember you.” Quanice (Moose) Hayes, “We remember you.”
And to all who lost their lives to police killings, “We remember you.”