On a weekday afternoon, Helen Fenn was traveling through Owyhee Junction on her way to her home in Nyssa when a bullet struck her white Chevrolet’s rear window.
She was one of the first victims of a frenzied shooting spree in the rural Malheur County village south of Nyssa, though the Nyssa resident was unaware of it at the time.
On Wednesday, January 22, a man who was locked in his house shot hundreds of rounds at houses, cars, and businesses throughout the course of the following few hours.
More than 100 police, firefighters, and medical personnel evacuated and subsequently cordoned off the village as a result of his activities, sparking one of the biggest law enforcement reactions in recent eastern Oregon history.
Police discovered that Joel E. Brousseau, 58, had committed suicide shortly before midnight, marking the conclusion of the story.
Additionally, it ended a family’s years-long battle to support a guy who was in great distress.
Life as a loner
In an interview, Jordan Valley resident Jay Brousseau, Brousseau’s brother, gave information on his younger brother’s life, and Brousseau’s daughter gave the Enterprise information in a written statement. She requested to remain anonymous.
Brousseau was the youngest of four sons and grew up in Oxnard, California.
As a child, Brousseau was a recluse who liked spending time in nature rather than with other people.
After a childhood buddy died by suicide, he never really recovered. When Brousseau was a teenager, his childhood friend passed away. Later, an automobile accident claimed the life of another close buddy. He was impacted by both deaths.
One of the few full-time jobs he had for around five years was with Ventura County’s sanitation authority.
According to his daughter, he was a multi-talented individual who spent his entire life working in construction.
He relocated to Meridian, Idaho, in 2000, but eventually made the decision to relocate once more.
His daughter claimed that he taught her gun safety since he loved the outdoors and was an enthusiastic hunter and fisherman.
The daughter claimed that he was a very good marksman. On a dime, he could aim and shoot (and not miss). She claimed that he had always been a law-abiding citizen and a responsible gun owner.
According to his brother, Brousseau stayed on the Oregon coast for around half a year. In 2019, he purchased a 1940s home on Owyhee Avenue, three doors west of the intersection with Oregon 201, according to Malheur County records. Brousseau, a master artisan, renovated the house.
According to his brother, he was living off an inheritance that had almost run out recently. He was living on credit from month to month.
According to his brother, Brousseau suffered from mental illness, and throughout the past three years, his paranoia has grown.
According to his daughter, my father never mentioned anything insane before relocating to Nyssa.
When Brousseau seemed to recognize that he needed treatment for a potential mental condition, there were rays of hope.
Jay Brousseau always stood behind his brother.
Buddy, let’s go, I said, the brother remarked. Right here, right now, I’ll take you.
Even though he was alone in his community, he occasionally showed friendliness.
Fenn thought back to her one encounter with Brousseau.
She was plucking weeds in her sister’s yard next door to Brousseau last summer. He promised to get rid of the weeds for her if she threw them into his land.
She responded, “It was nice of him to do that for me.”
However, Jay Brousseau stated that family members needed to exercise caution due to his brother’s instability and illness. His brother’s behavior could change at any time, and he would lose it.
Brousseau threatened to kill his brother last Christmas.
He began to have delusions about his neighbors plotting against him. Conversations with his sibling were dominated by that fear.
The disturbed guy informed the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office of his suspicions almost two years ago.
Brousseau informed his brother and daughter that he had reported trespassing on his land by members of the neighborhood. He claimed that the police informed him that the allegations were unfounded.
The daughter claimed that each time I phoned him, he would tell me the same tale about various events in which he would leave his house and return to find everything in disorder rather than how he had left it.
According to his brother, Brousseau believed that meant no one would assist him.
Jay stated that he didn’t like that at all. That’s most likely what set it off.
He wrote a letter to his daughter in Meridian exactly two years before to the shooting day, hinting at his plans after his encounter with the sheriff’s office.
It was impossible to determine the exact contents of the letter, but according to his brother, it detailed Brousseau’s plans for Owyhee Junction.
According to the daughter, he wrote about people violating his privacy and only asked assistance in catching them.
Brousseau accumulated hundreds of rounds of ammunition for his powerful semi-automatic rifle prior to the shooting. Among his other weapons was a shotgun.
He pushed furniture up against his front and side doors, blocking access to his house. He covered the windows with sheets.
Then he loosened up.
Quiet community disrupted
On Oregon 201, which runs north-south close to the Idaho border, Owyhee Junction is a significant intersection.
The intersection, which is the turnoff for campers, hikers, and other recreationalists wishing to travel west to Lake Owyhee, is situated between Nyssa and Adrian.
Its focal point is the Rock Store, which provides tourists with groceries and last-minute gasoline. Across the street is Rippin Lips Tackle, a bait store. The state highway and Owyhee Avenue, where Brousseau resided, are lined with a dozen residences and businesses.
Tyler Simpson was serving clients at the store he purchased in 2022 in the middle of the afternoon. He upgraded the gas pumps and added an outdoor patio with a tap house to a business that had been operating since 1932.
At around 2:15 p.m., he saw the transformer outside was smoking and he and the staff went outside the business.
From his house across the street and roughly 250 feet from the store, Brousseau started shooting at them. In the last four years, the shooter had only visited the store once.
Simpson’s head was struck by a single bullet.
He said that I was directly in his line of sight.
The store’s walk-in cooler was also hit by bullets.
Simpson said he, his customers and staff all moved to take cover on the other side of the building, where they would be pinned down for about an hour before police evacuated them.
The passing motorist, Fenn, joined them in their flight for safety.
She was driving home after taking her golden lab Tango for a walk, when she pulled up to the stop sign at the highway crossroads on Owyhee Avenue.
She thought it was exploding rubble in a burn pile when she heard a quick popping sound.
Unaware that a bullet had entered her car through the rear glass and exited through the passenger side windshield, Fenn continued on her way home. When she shut the door, the rear window broke, so she drove back to The Rock Store to voice her displeasure.
She struck an active shooting site with her car.
911 dispatchers were fielding a series of calls on the incident in the interim. The first was logged at 2:18 p.m.
We have a shooting that s going on, the woman caller reported. It s on Owyhee Avenue.
The dispatcher learned of the car being shot, of power going out in the area, that no one so far had been injured.
More calls came in over the next few moments as a sheriff s deputy and Oregon State Police troopers responded.
A deputy arrived just 17 minutes after the first call, soon joined by troopers and other deputies. Those at The Rock Store pointed to the shooter s location.
Brousseau apparently moved from place to place in his house, firing out windows. He pumped an estimated 200 rounds into the home to his east, where a woman cowered behind a washing machine for safety before her rescue.
His gunfire shattered windows in cars, trucks and trailers. He fired at other businesses, from the bait store to a shop 700 feet away that is home to Martin & Martin Builders.
Police and medics figured how to safely remove a man in a home to the west of Brousseau. The man had to be carried out because he was immobilized by illness. Police used an armored vehicle to shield them and the man.
As more police arrived, the community emptied of residents and filled with officers. Traffic in and out was stopped far from the scene. A command post was set up outside an onion shed about a half mile north of the junction.
Authorities later said that shortly after 3 p.m., Brousseau took aim at police officers, firing away.
By then, help was on the way from across Malheur County and throughout eastern Oregon. The Baker County Sheriff s Office sent its armored vehicle. Troopers from La Grande and Burns started 130-mile trips to get to the scene.
Ontario Fire and Rescue dispatched help that included its drone and Treasure Valley Paramedics staged crews.
Around 5 p.m., an officer not yet identified by authorities exchanged shots with Brousseau and then deputies from Malheur and Baker counties drove two armored vehicles up to Brousseau s home in an effort to pen him inside.
Police reached Jay Brousseau at his home at around 5:30 p.m., asking him to record a message by phone to his brother. This was the first that Jay Brousseau had heard about the shooting.The plan was to broadcast it at the house to get the gunman to surrender.
The message told Brousseau that his brothers loved him, that they wanted to go fishing with him and spend time together. It s unclear whether the message was played.
They worked to get a similar recording from the shooter s daughter.
Later that night, the highly-trained SWAT team from the Oregon State Police moved to end the event, using a specialized armored vehicle that had to travel roughly 400 miles from Salem to reach Owyhee Junction.
Using the vehicle, the troopers rammed the doors and windows. They deployed robots and drones into the house to give them video of what was going on inside.
Around 11:30 p.m., the team found Brousseau dead, apparently having taken his life with gunfire.
Inside, the home was littered with an estimated 300 bullet casings.
Soon, those among the 100 police and first responders on the scene began to leave. Residents were allowed back to their homes.
And state police investigators gathered evidence from Brousseau s home and around the junction, working through the following day.
The Rock Store remained closed until Saturday, Jan. 25, when power was finally restored.
Malheur County Sheriff Travis Johnson said the shooting prompted the largest law enforcement response he could recall in recent years in eastern Oregon.
No first responders or residents were injured.
With that much gunfire into buildings, into houses where people were, we were lucky that no one was hurt, Johnson said. I think it s a miracle.
Editor Les Zaitz contributed to this report.
Steven Mitchell can be reached at [email protected].
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, help is available. Call or text 988 for 24-hour, confidential support, or visit 988lifeline.org.
Latest Public Safety News
-
New lawsuit thrusts Oregon city once again into national spotlight on homelessness
-
Crashes on Oregon highways kill 2 drivers, injure third Monday
-
Police arrest man after fatal shooting in Vancouver park
-
Oregon drug trafficker busted third time; caught running $2M pot and shroom op
