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Nathan Thomas Honeycutt

Age : 26

Gender : Male

Race : White

Date : 09/27/2021

Location : SE 145th and SE Ridgecrest Road

City : Happy Valley

County : Clackamas

State : Oregon

Agency : Southeast 145th Avenue near Southeast Ridgecrest Road

Officer(s) :Janson Bento; Evan Sanders; Matthew Roach; Samuel Tharp

Cause of Death : Gunshot

Event : Killed by police during pursuit

OPEN RECORDS SUMMARY :

On 09/27/2021, Clackamas County Sheriff’s Deputy Janson Bento shot and killed 26-year-old Nathan Thomas Honeycutt following an attempted traffic stop, tire-deflation deployment, vehicle pursuit, PIT maneuver and physical struggle in Happy Valley.
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Deputy Evan Sanders first noticed Honeycutt’s older white Ford Ranger at approximately 2 a.m. because its tailgate was down and Sanders believed it had no license plates. Sanders then observed the truck repeatedly drift across the center line and estimated it was traveling approximately 50 mph in a 35 mph zone. Sanders later testified that he decided to initiate the traffic stop because he suspected Honeycutt might be driving under the influence and because of the speeding and missing license plates. At that point, police did not yet know the truck had been reported stolen.
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When Sanders activated his emergency lights and siren, Honeycutt accelerated away. Because the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office had changed its vehicle-pursuit policy only nine days earlier, Sanders deactivated his emergency equipment rather than immediately pursuing. He continued driving in the same direction and provided updates to other deputies.
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Sanders later saw the truck turn onto dead-end Southeast Scouters Mountain Road and placed spike strips across the road. Honeycutt drove over the strips and continued on damaged tires. Deputy Matthew Roach subsequently saw the truck traveling approximately 40 mph and then accelerating to approximately 50 mph while entering the oncoming lane. Roach activated his emergency lights and attempted another stop.
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Roach then performed a PIT maneuver near Southeast 145th Avenue and Southeast Ridgecrest Road. Honeycutt’s truck swerved, struck a traffic barrier and stopped. Roach positioned his patrol vehicle against the truck.
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Honeycutt exited and ran. Roach tackled him, and Bento and Samuel Tharp joined the attempt to restrain him. According to the deputies, Honeycutt struggled on the ground, said that he had a gun and would not show his hands.
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Police alleged that Bento freed one of Honeycutt’s arms and saw a revolver in his hand. According to the official account, Bento ordered Honeycutt to drop it, but Honeycutt did not comply and pointed the revolver inches from Bento’s chest. Bento fired three rounds into Honeycutt’s chest. Honeycutt died at the scene. Police recovered a loaded .357 Magnum revolver near his body.
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The Clackamas County District Attorney presented the shooting to a grand jury on October 22, 2021. Jurors reviewed deputy and civilian witness testimony, photographs, dispatch records and dash-camera recordings and unanimously concluded that Bento’s use of deadly force was legally justified. No criminal charges were filed.
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The circumstances acquired substantially greater scrutiny through later civil litigation. Nathan’s father, Danny Honeycutt, as personal representative of his son’s estate, filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Clackamas County, the Sheriff’s Office and deputies Bento, Sanders, Roach and Tharp. The suit alleged Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment violations, municipal liability, negligence, assault and battery.
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The lawsuit challenged more than Bento’s final gunshots. Honeycutt’s estate argued that the deputies improperly escalated an attempted traffic stop into the series of police actions that culminated in his death and specifically challenged the deputies’ conduct under the Sheriff’s Office’s newly tightened pursuit policy. The estate also argued that Bento had enough control of Honeycutt’s gun hand and sufficient time to warn that deadly force would be used before firing.
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Federal court records reveal an important detail absent from the original reporting: just nine days before Honeycutt was killed, Sheriff Angela Brandenburg had imposed a substantially more restrictive pursuit policy. Deputies were instructed to pursue only when they reasonably suspected a person had committed a felony person crime or when the person’s driving before initiation of the stop demonstrated a willful disregard creating an immediate danger of serious bodily injury or death.
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That change followed another Clackamas County pursuit on September 16, only 11 days before Honeycutt’s death, in which a pursuit of a shoplifting suspect resulted in a fatality. Contemporary OPB reporting specifically questioned whether the actions leading to Honeycutt’s death complied with the new pursuit restrictions.
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In March 2025, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman granted summary judgment to the deputies and county defendants. The court concluded that Bento’s fatal use of force was objectively reasonable under the circumstances documented by the evidence and rejected the estate’s constitutional and state-law claims.
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The litigation did not end there. Danny Honeycutt appealed the judgment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in April 2025. The federal appellate docket remained active later that year.
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OFFICER BACKGROUND
Janson Bento was the deputy who fired the three fatal shots. Evan Sanders initiated the attempted traffic stop and deployed the spike strips. Matthew Roach performed the PIT maneuver and tackled Honeycutt after he ran from the crashed truck. Samuel Tharp joined Bento and Roach in physically restraining Honeycutt.
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The later federal lawsuit uncovered a particularly important fact about Bento: Honeycutt was not his first lethal-force incident. Bento had already participated in the fatal police shooting of 54-year-old Timothy Barker on April 11, 2020, approximately 17 months before he killed Honeycutt.
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In the Barker case, deputies responded to a Milwaukie-area home after Barker’s wife reported that her husband had been drinking, acting irrationally and was armed. Deputies Nate Ariel, Tanner Davis and Janson Bento entered the home and encountered Barker with a shotgun. The three deputies fired a combined ten rounds, killing him. A grand jury later concluded that the deputies’ use of deadly force was justified.
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Thus, despite Bento having begun full-time employment as a Clackamas County deputy only in 2019, Honeycutt’s death was already at least the second fatal police shooting in which Bento had participated.
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The Sheriff’s Office itself was facing serious questions about its traffic-enforcement and pursuit practices when Honeycutt was killed. An Oregon Criminal Justice Commission review of 51 law-enforcement agencies had identified the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office as the only agency deficient in two of the three statistical measures used by the state to assess possible racial or ethnic disparities in traffic and pedestrian stops.
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The department also had a strikingly recent history of fatal traffic-stop encounters. In June 2021, only three months before Honeycutt’s death, Clackamas County Deputy Casey Newton shot and killed 44-year-old Jeremiah Lee Wright following another Happy Valley traffic stop that began because Wright’s vehicle did not have a license plate. Police subsequently learned that vehicle was stolen.
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Then, on September 16, 2021, another Clackamas County pursuit ended in a death after deputies pursued a shoplifting suspect. Sheriff Brandenburg responded by imposing the new restrictive pursuit rules on September 18. Honeycutt was killed nine days later after another attempted traffic stop escalated through spike strips and a PIT maneuver.
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The agency was also coming out of a major controversy involving Deputy Mark Nikolai during the 2020 Oregon wildfires. Video showed Nikolai repeating false claims that antifascists were starting fires and telling armed civilians that if they shot someone, they could place a knife in the person’s hand afterward. The Sheriff’s Office placed him on administrative leave after the recording became public.
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Honeycutt’s case therefore occurred amid documented problems involving traffic-stop disparities, controversial pursuit practices, multiple fatal traffic-stop encounters and serious questions about individual deputy conduct. Particularly important to the individual officer history is that Bento had already participated in another fatal shooting before becoming the deputy who fired the three shots that killed Honeycutt.

SOURCE LINKS :

https://www.koin.com/local/clackamas-county/deputies-shoot-kill-man-in-happy-valley/
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/27/clackamas-county-deputy-shoots-kills-person-during-traffic-stop/
https://katu.com/news/local/deputy-justified-in-deadly-shooting-of-hillsboro-man-during-traffic-stop
https://www.clackamas.us/da/reports
https://dochub.clackamas.us/documents/drupal/ffe050b9-7d83-46ff-bd03-c47ae09af68b
https://www.kxl.com/grand-jury-says-clackamas-county-sheriffs-deputy-justified-in-fatal-shooting/
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/oregon/ordce/3%3A2023cv00953/173978/35/
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ord-3_23-cv-00953/pdf/USCOURTS-ord-3_23-cv-00953-0.pdf
https://dockets.justia.com/docket/circuit-courts/ca9/25-2259
https://ktvz.com/news/crime-courts/2020/06/09/grand-jury-clears-3-deputies-who-shot-killed-man/