West Linn Police Chief Terry Timeus will never forget the horrifying series of events he witnessed Tuesday afternoon from inside his police station.

The chief told KGW he heard a horn honking and yelling and got up, walked to the window, saw a grey pick-up parked outside and knew something was very wrong.

“I could see the guy … I could tell he wasn’t thinking right,” Timeus said. “There’s no telling what was going through his mind. I mean, the look on his face, I can’t even describe it, but I knew something bad was going to happen. You could tell by looking at the guy.”

Timeus said the killer, later identified as Newton Bill McMurtrey, had a “thousand yard stare, like he had no life in his eyes.”

“He was intent on doing what he decided to do,” Timeus said. “He had a look like he wasn’t there.”

“I’m looking, trying to figure out what’s going on, and I see a wood stock come up that looked familiar to me because I’m a hunter. It looked like a rifle stock,” Timeus said. “I see him pull it up and he’s manipulating the round and he’s trying to get it out of his window. At that point a blue SUV takes off.”

Timeus called the record supervisor and told her there was somebody in the parking lot with a gun. Then he headed for the stairs.

He heard the first shot at the top of stairs and a second shot on the way down.

“We checked both the victim and the suspect. The suspect had a near-fatal wound and the victim was fatally shot,” Timeus said.

“Anytime you hear gunshots, you don’t know if they’re coming for you, you don’t know what the circumstances are, you just know you have to get out there and do what you can to help,” he added.

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“It was a scary, tense situation for a few minutes. We didn’t know where the shooter was. We didn’t know if we had more than one shooter,”

In his nearly 26 years in law enforcement, Timeus has never seen anything like what happened Tuesday.

“I’ve seen domestic violence situations. I’ve seen people die from gunfire, but I’ve never witnessed something like that,” he said.

“She did the right thing, but unfortunately he was ready, prepared, he had a plan, and there was nothing anybody could do to keep him from carrying it out,” Timeus said.