The Mysterious and Tragic Death of Yusely Verdecia Reyes — One Year Later, Part One
TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES AND DEPICTION
Ed. Note: To date, there has not been a single arrest, indictment, or investigation that CDR knows of regarding the horrendous death of Yusely Verdecia Reyes in May of 2021.
We remain hopeful, vigilant, and confident that one day authorities will find justice for what happened to this beautiful young woman of 18 years. We covered her case extensively, and reprint here with hopes to keep her story, her memory, alive.
And the pressure on all stakeholders, full bore.
Just one witness, that’s all it will take. We know you’re out there. There are many of you out there who saw what happened, from bushes behind which you cowered fearing for your life when you stumbled onto what was happening, from your tent window when you were awoken, from your apartment window directly adjacent and ten feet away from the scene of the crime. Please, find the way and courage, create the protection you will need to step forward and help authorities find the vile creatures who raped and tortured Yusely, then left her hanging from a tree. The statute of limitation for murder does not exist, so you have a lot of time to work with.
Here is a reprint of Part One of Yusely’s story, expressing CDR’s determination to never forget Yusely, or ever let her killers think for a second we are not waiting for the day police make those fateful arrests.
This is a true story, a story of the ultimate toll houselessness can take.
This is the story of how evil creeps into our neighborhoods when we turn our backs on people, treat them like trash.
This is a story about a young, beautiful — inside and out — girl who stumbled onto a dark path — a story about a torture and death in a Portland, Oregon, neighborhood historically known for its “small town within a city” feel.
This is a story that should sadden — and scare — you.
It speaks to the dramatic and continual “quality of life” decline that once had Portland crowned as the Most Beautiful City in the United States, Most Livable, and even ranked continually in top 25 cities globally.
Portland’s Downswing
In the broad picture, Portland’s downswing is massive, and multi-faceted.
Federal social service programs, often administered through state and county agencies, have burgeoned with COVID relief cash, the most cash they’ve received in decades, possibly ever, since their respective inceptions.
Yet, the housing crisis in Portland has outpaced in severity even against these extraordinary solution and stop-gap spending measures.
Social and youth service organizations, including non-governmental agencies (NGOs), have not been able to avert Oregon’s consistent #1 rank of all 50 states having highest percentage of the estimated 2.5 million homeless children nationally.
Meanwhile, Portland City Council, and other officials, unabashedly left Portland Police Bureau (PPB) officers alone to fend off utter destruction of downtown from unruly daily protests in 2020, then fully blamed the force for violence after they were over, leading to more outcries from activists to further “defund the police.”
Coinciding with this treatment from City Hall, demand for police services increased dramatically, hitting a record 4,045 calls to dispatch in a single day, May 29, 2021.
There are currently slightly over 500 sworn police officers estimated to be employed by PPB, and only a portion of those are designated for field patrol.
Estimates of gun violence and car theft have, subsequently, skyrocketed over 500% so far this year, and have even local left-leaning publications wondering if Portland has become the nation’s murder capitol.
Violence against women has also reached extremely high levels, with Multnomah County estimating that one out of seven women met with violence from an intimate partner within its borders during the last full year statistics were measured.
The county also estimates 21,000 of its children were exposed to domestic violence within the review period.
The response from officials toward this bursting-dam of problems has been at best, flaccid, and like denominators, it always seems liker the lower stratum seems to determine how any equation turns out.
In this case, that lower stratum is the homeless, if only because they are already vulnerable, unable to fend off their being blamed for the region’s breakdown because they are too busy collecting recyclable cans to survive.
In their tents.
Until very recently, the Mayor’s Office only had one solution publicly advocated: sweeps.
“Sweep where?” became the operative question from those living outdoors, advocates and observers who have cared deeply for the issue.
Apparently, using borrowed terminology and vacant land will have to suffice, as homeless safe rest “villages” will be serving as dustpans in which to sweep those who suffer existentially from Portland’s humanitarian crisis, now officially in its sixth year.
This, even though sweeps have been deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS) as recently as 2019, allowing to stand the lower 9th Circuit Court of Appeals 2018 branding of them as “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The LPGA recently cancelled their annual prestigious Portland Classic golf tournament at Columbia Edgewater Country Club, citing their engagement with homeless individuals on Marine Drive who snuck onto the greens when advance teams arrived, subsequent safety issues, and horrendous stories of neglect from city leaders as their reasons.
Until then, sweeps alone were City Hall’s response. The safe rest village strategy came shortly thereafter.
(CDR twice contacted for comment Sam Adams, former Portland Mayor, and current Director of Strategic Innovations for current mayor, Ted Wheeler. There was no response.)
Mayor Wheeler has taken multiple hits from various political, special interest, crisis response, neighborhood, and journalism organizations, locally and nationally, as well as from public at-large, for his apparent inability to tackle, or even at times acknowledge, the homeless epidemic.
His defense, almost unilaterally from all agencies over and with which he serves, places blame not on an unresponsive City Hall, but on the COVID pandemic, resulting business and institutional shut-downs, and economic fallout from all of the above.
Reaction to that argument often points out reports from prior years were flush with “charts and graphs”, but lacked severely infrastructure teeth that would have been necessary to prevent social service collapse.
Yusely Verdecia Reyes’s Agonizing Death
None of these factors, from macro view, matter any longer to one young Portland woman, because it is too late. She lost her life as a result of these multiple government and service agency failures.
Like an hourglass funnel, chances for this youngster to survive current urban challenges swirled like an eddy with ever-growing strength, reaching such power even family members were unable to stop her descent, one which led to a most heinous and senseless end owing to such horrendous details they are not even printable here.
Yusely Verdecia Reyes died at 6:02pm, last May the 26th.
She was alleged to have been savagely tortured and raped by a posse of male co-inhabitants of the homeless encampment in which she lived, reporting by County Democrat Reader’s will show.
Yusely survived this, and was then allegedly hung from a tree limb, made to look like a suicide, left to dangle while gasping for air not five feet from a public path created to provide safe, paved urban bicycle and hiking options for commuters and entire families, 20 yards from a children’s playground.
Yusely also survived this, was cut down from the tree in time by an neighboring apartment complex dweller to be rushed to a local hospital, where, on life support, she fought for her life for nearly a week.
Her mother, Marbelis Reyes, flew in from out of state as soon as she could, was able to take pictures of her daughter’s mangled, bruised and lacerated body, watch each labored breath until she was convinced by physicians it was time to pull the plug on life-support systems.
There was no chance, doctors determined, Yusely would regain consciousness.
Yusely lived nearly another two days after that, and finally passed on May 26th, 2021, three months after turning 18.
“Congratulations” — Parsing Out Blame
Congratulations for failing are in order:
Congratulations, City Hall. Your sweeps strategy worked not so well here.
Congratulations, youth and family services. How was a 32-year-old man allowed to continue dating a 15-year-old for years after this became known to you? Especially after police reports had been filed for gruesome violence against the child?
Congratulations, federal law enforcement. Your embedded agents, drone surveillance and 24/7 cameras did absolutely nothing to save Yusely’s life.
Congratulations, police agencies, who have to CDR’s awareness not even conducted a single interview or investigation about Yusely’s death, and had “cause of death: suicide” paperwork prepared even days before she perished, says her mother.
Congratulations Medical Examiner’s office, which, despite having a corpse in their midst riddled with contusions, lacerations, and signs of rape, conducted forensic autopsy only for suicide, nothing more, as they say they were directed to by officials in charge of the case.
Congratulations, neighbors of the encampment adjacent to where Yusely lived, not only for ignoring her screams and cries the night she was allegedly murdered, but for all those prior, from the long list of missing girls and women who are suspected to have met with foul play over the last half decade in The Cut. Their bodies, by the way, are still buried there, say many campers.
Congratulations to the drug cartel gang responsible for transportation and dealing of addictive street drugs that have killed countless houseless individuals this year because of fentanyl lacing, whose merciless tactics have scared eyewitnesses, police and everyone in between from testifying to the truth of what happened last late May, and created a virtual army of drug-dependent soldiers willing to do whatever is asked of them to keep flows going — even murder — against the city which has cruelly and coldly made it clear they do not care.
Congratulations to Yusely, as well, for surely she knew the path she was on was not the safest.
I know this, because she told me, first hand. She also told me, “Don’t worry about this black [heroin] thing. I’m gonna kick it. You’ll see, no problem. And then, I’m going to have a place, a house, for girls just like me to go to. And if I can’t be the counselor or therapist or whatever to help, because of schooling or whatever, then I’m just gonna get the money together, somehow, some way, and give it to the people who can help.”
I believed her.
Those were not, however, the last words Yusely spoke to me.
Her last words were whispered in my ear when I saw her eight days before she was attacked.
“I need to talk with you. It’s important. Please.”
I knew instantly Yusely was in serious trouble.
I’d known her for three years, and although she lied about her age (and she had looks that made her telling all she was “over 18” seem legitimate), she’d never asked me for help of any kind.
She’d never asked to speak with me away from the others.
And she had never whispered in my ear.
I waited four hours that day, sitting in damp dirt that left stains on my pants that several washing later still won’t remove.
Finally someone returned with a message: “Yusely can’t see you right now. She told me to tell you that you need to come back, try again.”
Yes, I was concerned. Of course I was.
During the eight days it took for me to return to where she lived, I assuaged my feelings of urgency with calming, opiating, deceptive self-talk: “Yusely is strong.” “Nothing that serious happens in The Cut, it’s all just rumor.” “Dude, you need to just chill, everything is going to be all right.”
I should have counted the number of times I felt compelled to say such things to myself, instead of my pocket change.
Had I, I am sure, I would have instantly seen a tally that would have alarmed me, forced me, to realize what I was denying: I was terrified for her.
Looking back, of course I could have saved her life.
So, along with everyone else, congratulations are in order for me.
Mostly to me.
Especially me, for not acting when a youngster called on me desperately for help.
Trust me, I will carry this guilt for the rest of my life, and I will use it to drive things like completing this investigation, and publishing this story.
I could have done more.
I should have done more.
So could, should have: you.
Yusely Verdecia Reyes, time and time again, emerges somehow as an unlikely stratagem that showcases with fierce, unrelenting clarity the faults, weaknesses and opportunities to prevent the Next Girl from being forced to endure such tragedy.
No matter how one holds up her case, how it is compared, or measured, it seems to have uncanny focus on where we let her down.
Worst of all, the perpetrators of her Yusely’s alleged murder are walking free. All five, as well as those who helped plan the grisly night of attack. What’s worse, there are several reports surfacing of missing or murdered women since Yusely’s death.
County Democrat Reader will embark on a multi-part series examining Yusely’s life, and death, via chronology of a months long, perilous investigation attempting to make sense of the senseless end of a most beautiful and loving young soul.
