Sister, friend share insight into Bend museum assailant
The High Desert Museum reopened Thursday, two days after an officer-involved shooting left a Bend man dead
The man identified as the assailant, Nicholas Berger, 36 was new to the Bend area and was working at Costco, NewsChannel 21 learned Thursday.
Melissa Toon, Berger’s sister, spoke to us by phone, saying her brother was planning on driving down to California to visit her.
“He didn’t deserve to die,” Melissa Toon said.
Family and friends are still in shock over the news that Berger was shot and killed by an Oregon State Police trooper after authorities said he grabbed and threatened to kill a museum gift store worker, wrapping his arm around her throat and pulling her through the halls of the busy museum Tuesday afternoon.
Toon said her brother moved to Bend because his grandmother lived here.
“He wasn’t a monster, he wasn’t some kind of crazy person that was going to kill anybody. He wasn’t going to do that,” Toon said.
Toon said Berger loved to fish and hunt, and suffered from depression after his father passed away.
Jennifer Gonzalez said she met Berger a few weeks ago while he was working at Costco. She said he was a great guy who loved to help others.
Berger was recovering from a drug addiction, she said, and was trying to move on from his past.
“He felt like he was starting to make friends and start making good choices,” Gonzalez said.
She said the pictures released during Wednesday’s press conference did not show the man she knew.
“Those photos — I don’t know who that was. I don’t think he know who he was in that photo,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said she’s still trying to figure out what caused Berger to snap and try to kill someone.
“We don’t know what happened, and unfortunately we will never know what happened,” she said. “I just want people to know he wasn’t a criminal in our eyes.”
An autopsy was conducted on Berger Wednesday at the state Medical Examiner’s Office in Clackamas. The results have not yet been released,. Among other things, investigators will learn from test results in coming days whether he had any drugs in his system at the time of the assault.
