A woman shot and killed in Portland last month was buried Sunday in her hometown cemetery in southern Oregon as her 17-year-old son remains in a Multnomah County juvenile detention center on charges of killing her.
Connie Campagna-Martinez, 48, was working in construction as part of a post-incarceration fresh start when she was shot March 31 inside an apartment provided by her employer in the Lents neighborhood, according to police and family members.
Standing Bear Campagna, the youngest of Campagna-Martinez’s five children, was arrested April 8 in Chiloquin, the rural town where his mother grew up, on charges of second-degree murder and unlawful use of a weapon.
Mother and son had been living together in Portland at the time, according to Campagna-Martinez’s grandmother, Patty Miske.
“She was trying to repair that relationship, but he had a deep anger,” said Miske, 88. “She loved her kids.”
Standing Bear Campagna is charged in Juvenile Court, where almost all records are sealed. Police and prosecutors have released few details of the killing.
Campagna-Martinez had been arrested throughout her life on drug and theft charges, court records show, and had spent nearly seven years in federal prison for unlawfully possessing a gun and then escaping home detention. She was released in 2021.
Miske, a former Methodist pastor who raised Campagna-Martinez, said Portland represented a real chance for her granddaughter to turn things around. Campagna-Martinez was a member of the Klamath Tribes and won high praise from her boss at the construction company, where she was the lone woman on her crew, Miske said.
— Zane Sparling; zsparling@oregonian.com; 503-319-7083; @pdxzane
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