The death of Fred Goetz still reverberates
Updated Dec 12, 2020;
Posted Dec 09, 2020
Protesters built barricades outside of a house on North Mississippi Ave. in Portland on December 8, 2020Brooke Herbert/The Oregonian
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He disappeared on Tuesdays. He never said where. He didn’t leave a trail of bread crumbs.
He didn’t feel the need to explain where he was going or why.
Week after week, Fred Goetz crept under the bridges. He marched down the alleys and the dim hallways. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes with a street minister named Gary Smith.
“They went into what Father Gary called the bat caves, the terrible dark rooms where people suffer in loneliness,” said Mary Sue Richen of the Macdonald Center in Portland’s Old Town.