Russell Courtier—the 38-year-old member of the European Kindred white supremacist gang who's accused of the racially-motivated August murder of 19-year-old Larnell Bruce in Gresham—is facing even more legal trouble after an indictment Tuesday for a 2015 assault.
A few weeks after the Mercury reported on a 2015 bar fight involving Courtier, where he allegedly bashed a guy unconscious with a pool ball less than a year before Bruce's murder, Multnomah County prosecutors sent the 2015 incident to grand jury. Courtier was indicted yesterday for second degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon. He was let off the hook by prosecutors directly after it originally happened, as we reported in October, though he admitted to his probation officer he did it.
Here's the police report from the incident, and here's the probation/parole document where he admitted to the assault.
If you've missed our reporting on Russell Courtier so far, here's what what we've done:
•August 22: A blog post documenting that the accused killer of Larnell Bruce has ties to European Kindred.
•August 31: After obtaining his prison discipline records, we showed that Courtier's white supremacist gang involvement goes back at least 12 years.
•September 13: A blog post detailing that, after the Mercury exposed Courtier as a white supremacist, prosecutors sent the case back to a grand jury, which re-indicted him with additional hate crime counts.
•October 26: After obtaining his Multnomah County probation/parole file, we showed that prosecutors missed the 2015 bar assault for which he was just indicted.
Here's what we reported in October about the 2015 assault that led to yesterday's indictment:
After being released from prison in January 2015—he’d punched and attacked a female stranger with a knife in December 2013—Courtier was scheduled for supervised release through next April. But Courtier’s Multnomah County probation and parole file, obtained by the Mercury in an open records request, show Courtier violated his post-prison supervision again and again in the 19 months between his release and when he allegedly killed Bruce. And it appears he was let off the hook for a crime that otherwise could have put him behind bars again, 11 months before he killed Bruce.According to a September 2015 police report (read that here), Courtier was drunk at a Gresham bar when he grabbed a pool ball and bashed a man in the head repeatedly, rendering him bloody and unconscious. The report says Courtier was presenting himself as a Marine at the time—though he was never in the military—and became upset when the guy, an actual veteran, called him a “fake Marine.” Courtier told police that the other man attacked first, but he couldn’t explain why he had no injuries and his adversary was beaten to a pulp.
On the same day Gresham police forwarded the case against Courtier for the beat down, court records show Multnomah County prosecutors dropped the assault charges. Five days later, however, parole records say Courtier “admitted the allegations” to his parole officer (read the document here) and “accepted the sanction” for parole violations—both because he’d been drinking and because he didn’t “obey all laws.” For the violent attack, Courtier got 12 days in jail followed by 60 days with an alcohol-monitoring bracelet.
Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney David Hannon, who’s prosecuting Courtier for running down Bruce, declined to discuss with the Mercury why the 2015 assault charges went away.
We reached out to the Multnomah County prosecutor on the new case, but it's after 3 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving. We'll update this story if we hear back. Here's the indictment: