The owner of North Portland’s long-contested Red House is facing a fresh set of felony charges after police say they found firearms and body armor in his home while investigating a menacing complaint from construction workers who say he threatened to shoot them. William Kinney III, 41, was arrested after officers executed a search warrant at the property, located at 4406 N. Mississippi Ave., where a week-long armed occupation drew national attention back in 2020.
According to KOIN, nearby construction workers reported on July 6 that Kinney was throwing rocks and threatening to shoot them, a complaint that led to an outstanding warrant for his arrest. One of the workers reportedly filed for a protective order against him. Kinney was booked at the time on charges including felon in possession of a firearm, unlawful possession of firearms, second-degree disorderly conduct and third-degree escape, KOIN reported, after he posted bail and then fled from officers on foot before being caught and arrested.
Kinney reportedly told officers he thought it was a good chase, and he later pleaded not guilty to the charges stemming from the July incident, per KOIN’s report. Then, on August 4, police returned to the Red House to execute a search warrant connected to that same menacing case. That search turned up additional firearms and body armor, leading to four counts of felon in possession of a firearm and three counts of felon in possession of body armor, the station reported.
A Felony Conviction Rooted in a 2002 Fatal Crash
The felon-in-possession charges hinge on a violent felony Kinney has carried for more than two decades. In 2002, he was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to criminally negligent homicide and hit-and-run for a high-speed crash that killed 83-year-old newspaper columnist Frederick Goetz and injured Goetz’s wife, according to Crime Victims United. Kinney was 17 at the time of the crash.
Under Oregon Revised Statutes § 166.270, a felon who knowingly owns or possesses a firearm commits a Class C felony carrying up to five years in prison and fines as high as $125,000, per Zuanich Law PLLC. Separately, Oregon law under ORS § 166.642 makes it a Class C felony, also punishable by up to five years in state prison, for someone convicted of a violent felony or misdemeanor to possess body armor, according to the Oregon State Legislature.
How the Family Lost the Red House
The Red House itself carries decades of history predating the current charges. William Kinney Jr.’s parents bought the property with cash in 1955 after moving to Portland from Little Rock, Arkansas, to escape Southern redlining and racial oppression in home lending, according to the World Socialist Web Site. The family owned the home debt-free for decades until May 2002, when they took out a $96,300 mortgage specifically to pay for Kinney’s legal defense after the fatal crash. That debt eventually led to a 2018 foreclosure on the property.
Kinney, who also uses the name William X. Nietzche, repeatedly filed court documents asserting sovereign citizen and Moorish sovereign status, arguing that local, state and federal laws — including mortgage obligations — did not apply to his family, according to KGW. That legal strategy failed to stop the foreclosure and left the family without recourse through traditional assistance programs.
The 2020 Standoff and an Unresolved Deal
The foreclosure eventually triggered one of Portland’s most visible flashpoints of 2020. When local law enforcement tried unsuccessfully to evict Red House occupants that year, antifascist and anti-government sovereign citizen activists blocked entry to the home and the street outside it. Activists built multi-block barricades across North Mississippi Avenue, prompting then-Mayor Ted Wheeler to declare there would be, in his words, no autonomous zone in Portland, before city negotiators moved in to de-escalate the standoff, according to The Guardian.
An online GoFundMe campaign launched during the occupation raised more than $300,000 to help the Kinney family repurchase the home, according to Wikipedia. Around the same time, the property owner reached an agreement with residents to sell the Red House back to them at cost. But that repurchase deal was never finalized, and the property’s legal ownership status remained unresolved for years afterward, according to a Facebook post from The Oregonian citing its own prior reporting.
Years of Neighborhood Tension
The standoff’s end did not bring peace to the block. In 2021, neighbors on North Mississippi Avenue reported ongoing confrontations with Kinney, including one recorded incident in which he berated a resident at their front door, prompting city officials and police to advise neighbors to avoid him, per the same Oregonian-sourced account. That pattern of friction with surrounding property owners predates this summer’s altercation with the construction workers by several years.
Kinney has pleaded not guilty to the charges tied to the July incident, and it remains unclear how the additional firearm and body armor counts from the August search will be resolved in court. The Red House, once the epicenter of a national debate over gentrification and racial displacement in Portland’s historically Black Albina district, now sits at the center of a case defined less by activism than by felony gun law.
