Portland Homicide Indictment Charges Man In 5 Shootings, 3 Deaths

PORTLAND, OR — Joseph Kelly Banks shot and killed three people in the first three months of 2022, according to a new indictment in Multnomah County Court. Banks, 49, appeared in court on Tuesday where he entered pleas of not guilty.

The indictment charges Banks with three counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, and several counts of assault and unlawful use of a firearm.

He's being held without bail at the Multnomah County Detention Center and is due back in court on May 9.

The three murders that Banks is charged with are:

• Jan. 2, 2022 – 35-year-old Isaiah Hurst by North Vancouver Avenue and Morgan Street;
• Feb. 2, 2022 – 35-year-old Jeff Ramirez by Southeast Stark Street and 119th Avenue; and
• March 1, 2022 – 55-year-old Mark Johnson by Dawson Park in the Eliot neighborhood.

All three were shot and killed.

The day before Johnson was killed, a woman was shot by North Williams Avenue and Stanton Street. As police investigated that shooting, other officers responded five minutes later to Northeast Garfield Avenue, about 10 blocks away.

There, they found another gunshot victim. Both of those victims survived.

Police say that on February 2, the day that they say that Banks killed Jeff Ramirez, he also shot someone about a block away. That person survived.

Law enforcement officials not authorized to speak publicly about the case say that there isn't any indication that Banks knew any of his victims.

Banks has been living in a group home for adults since earlier this year, according to officials. He was transferred there after being confined to a Federal Medical Center in North Carolina.

Banks had been charged by federal prosecutors in 2007 with being a felon in possession of a weapon – court records show around a dozen felony convictions in his past – but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He had been released in 2009 but was taken back into custody in 2011 after he skipped several medical appointments in violation of the terms of his release.

In May 2012, a report from the Risk Assessment Panel of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons found that releasing Banks would "create a substantial risk of bodily injury or serous damage to the property of another."

Court records show that an Annual Forensic Update in June 2020 said that Banks' treatment team "believes that his mental condition has improved to the extent that he is now stabilized on a regimen of psychotropic medication.

"It is the clinicians' opinion that the Defendant no longer requires inpatient psychiatric care and sufficiently recovered from his mental illness so that his release under a prescribed regimen of medical, psychiatric, or psychological treatment would no longer create a substantial risk of bodily injury to another person or serious damage to the property of another."