The press release from the Portland Police Bureau landed in the newsroom inbox in the summer of 2023: A driver wounded in a shooting had sped across the city and slammed into another car, killing a child.
The news staff could have written a brief and moved on.
But the city was amid what would turn out to be a record number of fatal crashes in Portland and a continuing paroxysm of pandemic-era shootings.
Reporter Noelle Crombie learned that the driver, Duprie Smith, had been shot at a gathering to mark the anniversary of his brother’s death and that his brother had been fatally shot leaving the funeral of another Black man who also died in a shooting.
She saw the story as a means to chronicle the bleak nexus of violence that bore down on the city, disproportionately harming a single generation of Black men, while also giving full due to the boy killed in the crash.
She spent months studying the lives of Smith and 11-year-old Ryan Ambrose, determined to tell the story of their tragic collision with care and sensitivity.
It took two years for Smith to agree to talk to Crombie. She interviewed him in a series of calls and messages from prison.
She earned the deep trust of Ryan’s family to draw a full portrait of a boy still grieving the loss of his own father in a car wreck years earlier. In the weeks after the collision, she traveled to Arizona to interview Ryan’s extended family and his teachers.
Crombie’s story takes readers into intimate places: the thoughts of a driver as he raced across the city, the bedroom of a child on the cusp of adolescence, the sanctuary of a funeral home in Yuma where a mother stood alone to grieve for her only child, a Portland jail cell where a driver learned his actions caused a boy’s death.
And the project’s presentation similarly takes readers along for the ride. Through dashcam footage, they see the cityscape whir by — all leading to the inescapable collision, as caputred from afar. Intimate photogragraphy from the grieving boy’s family showcases the life he left behind.
Crombie’s meticulously reported and propulsive narrative reconstructs the events leading up to the crash, reveals nuanced portraits of the lives that intersected that night and helped readers understand the two public safety crises that helped shape the city in the pandemic and during the years that immediately followed.
