Smiling China Hat armed menacing suspect still wants to represent self in court; judge unsure, appoints defender

(Update: Adding video from Monday arraignment, comments by Bennett, judge)

Judge unsure Nathaniel Bennett is knowingly waiving right to an attorney, will revisit issue

BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) – A transient accused of firing a gun and menacing a touring Kansas family returned to Deschutes County Circuit Court Monday for arraignment on expanded charges in a 14-count grand jury indictment, and again said he wants to be his own lawyer.

Nathaniel Bennett was smiling and even chuckling at times, with some lengthy pauses before answering, and Judge Raymond Crutchley wasn't sure about the defendant fully understanding the constitutional rights he was waiving and risks he was taking. So he appointed an attorney anyway, at least for now.

As Judge Alycia Herriott had a week earlier, Crutchley told Bennett of the risks of representing one's self in court. He also gave him a few minutes to read the waiver document, which he had yet to sign.

When Crutchley asked if he understood everything he'd told him, Bennett replied, "I believe so."

"Alright, what is it, if anything, that you do not understand?"

"Sometimes, just the way I feel," he replied.

"Alright, so, not asking about your feelings today," the judge responded.

Crutchley later asked Bennett if he was currently on any drugs or medication. "No, not currently," he replied.

Soon, Crutchley told Bennett, "I'm not quite sure that you are fully understanding what a disadvantage or the risks are (of representing yourself). I'm not going to accept your waiver today. I'm going to allow you to readdress this at a certain point in the future."

Instead, he appointed the Bend Attorney Group to represent him, and public defender Dylan Potter stepped into that role.

A two-hour hearing is scheduled Thursday afternoon regarding the parole violation for a previous conviction and possibly on a state motion regarding whether Bennett is mentally able to aid and assist in his own defense.

A Kansas couple recently shared with NewsChannel 21 and a grand jury the details of their family’s terrifying encounter with the enraged, armed homeless man near China Hat Road south of Bend, saying they feared for their lives when he pointed a shotgun at them and fired a shot near one of their three frightened daughters before they could flee to safety.

The pair provided to NewsChannel 21 the statements they later read to a grand jury Friday, as it decided on formal charges against Bennett, who resisted arrest and was taken into custody with the assistance of a SWAT team armored car, a negotiator and two K-9s. They told of how he repeatedly hit them with the rifle in their chest and helmet before they could drive away.

After hearing from the couple and two others, a grand jury on Friday returned a 14-count indictment against Bennett.

He was indicted on three felony counts of unlawful use of a weapon and 11 misdemeanor charges: three counts each of recklessly endangering another person, menacing and pointing a firearm at another, as well as single counts of resisting arrest and interfering with a law enforcement animal.

The Kansas family -- a 49-year-old man, his 48-year-old wife and their three daughters, the youngest 14 -- was visiting Oregon over Thanksgiving break and had planned to ski at Mt. Bachelor. But it wasn’t open yet, so they decided to sign up for a two-hour ATV “Badlands Tour” organized by Outriders Northwest last Friday, setting out in a group of four ATVs, one driven by the tour guide.

“We were a very slow, tame group and the guide had to constantly stop and wait on our group,” the woman wrote of the time before the “ambush.” She said the tour guide was leading the way but as they headed back to the meeting point, he turned back and said the road was blocked, telling the others to turn around before he drove off and the new ATV riders tried to navigate a sharp right turn.

As the first-time ATV driver, accompanied by their 17-year-old middle daughter (their oldest is 20), came over a rise, she said, “I did not register this as a ‘campsite’ … it only registered that a bunch of trash was blocking the road. At no point in time did I ever think I was on anyone’s property, campsite or any type of living situation. I would absolutely never trespass on anyone’s property.”

She turned into a “clearly marked turn-around area to my left” when she started noticing items including a black trash bag, a dog bowl and “lots of other trash.” She ended up trapped with the ATV up against a tree and “what I thought was an abandoned van behind me. … (I) never dreamed someone was living in this.”

As she tried to put the ATV in reverse, “I heard the most chilling, loud, angry snarl yell, ‘You pieces of ----, I’m going to shoot you.” Soon, the daughter riding with her screams, "‘Mommy, he has a gun!' I turn my head and see a long gun aimed right at our heads and it goes off with an ear-exploding bang. I believed with my whole heart that my daughter was hit because I had never heard such a wail come out of my daughter.”

As the 17-year-old slumped down in her seat, “wailing loudly,” the woman said she put her hands in the air and “the assailant came around to the front right side of me and hit me, poked me with the gun to my front right chest and shoulder over and over. I repeatedly said I was so sorry and please just let me check my daughter and then let us leave … my hands up, pleading for him to let us go.”

“While I was pleading for our lives, I also noticed out of the corner of my left eye that my husband was moving towards us with his hands up. He is calm but loudly saying, ‘Take the gun off my family, just let us go, we are leaving, we are leaving.'” She said he then hit her husband in the helmet with the rifle, pushing the end into his face over and over “while repeatedly in an enraged snarl saying ‘You are disrespecting pieces of ---, you pieces of ---.”

Their eldest daughter, at the other ATV on a slope above the scene, soon got on her knees with her hands up as well, pleading, ‘Please don’t shoot my parents.” The woman said the gunman never stopped pointing the gun at them as they left the area.

In his statement, the husband said his ATV was about 30 yards away when he heard what sounded like a shotgun blast, so he began to run down the hill. “I had my hands up coming down the hill, yelling, ‘Whoa whoa whoa!’

The husband said the assailant rammed the shotgun into his chest several times, and he pulled his wife from the driver’s seat, helping her into the back seat. As he turned to climb into the driver’s seat, the man whom he referred to several times as “the terrorist” was at the front of the ATV and rammed the barrel of the loaded shotgun into the face shield several times, then the side of his helmet while yelling and threatening the family.

As he put the ATV in reverse and they drove away to safety, the man said his teen daughter veered between a catatonic and hysterical state, later telling a deputy, “I thought we were going to die.”

The woman said, “I haven’t truly slept since this occurred,” with pain in her left ear, tinnitus and dizziness since returning home, where the couple arranged for their shaken daughters to see therapists.

“This day has changed our lives and we will never be the same,” the woman wrote. “My only hope is that this person cannot get ahold of a weapon again, because I don’t think the next family that came upon him would be so lucky.”

“We thought we were going to be shot any second,” the father wrote in his grand jury statement. “How do we know what would have happened to my wife and daughter if I had not come to their ATV? … I truly thought the gun was going to go off again – a damn miracle it didn’t, truly.”

He said his family has empathy for “houseless humans, as well as those with mental illness.” But the pharmacist, whose wife is a 30-year registered nurse, said, “In our health care opinion, especially after the arraignment, that this terrorist is not mentally ill, just defiant, evil and a coward.”

“We do not, at this time, wish to pursue anything beyond the maximum penalties allowed by Oregon and (the) county,” the husband wrote, “but should your processes fail, we are more than prepared to pursue justice for our family and protection from this coward who terrorized my wife and daughters.”

He concluded his statement by saying: “My family wishes to commend the DCSO, the deputies who responded and then had to be in harms way, Bryan the detective, Isabel and advocate assigned to us, and the prosecution for their support and kindness.”