A 20-year-old Portland man will spend the next two decades in prison for killing his neighbor, 38-year-old LaToya Hill, during a dispute outside a Southeast Portland home in 2024. Kamari Gates was sentenced to 20 years for shooting Hill and firing at her fiancée, Danielle McGruder, who witnessed the attack from inside the house.
Guilty Plea Leads to Consecutive Sentences
Gates pleaded guilty in July to first-degree manslaughter in Hill's death and first-degree attempted murder for firing at McGruder, according to OregonLive.com. Multnomah County Judge Jenna Plank handed down 10 years for each charge, ordering the sentences be served consecutively for a total of 20 years. Gates will receive credit for time served since his 2024 arrest and will be subject to three years of post-prison supervision once he's released.
Plank told Gates that “no dispute is ever worth erasing another person,” according to the outlet's report. The comment referred to the conflict that had developed between the Gates and Hill families before the shooting, although the specific nature of that disagreement has not been detailed publicly.
Shot While Taking Out the Recycling
The shooting happened the morning of Sept. 17, 2024, near Powell Butte Nature Park in Southeast Portland, not long after Hill and McGruder had returned home from dropping their children off at school. Hill was outside tossing cans into the couple's recycling bin when she was shot in the head. Reports on the exact timing have varied — the outlet's later account places the shooting just before 9 a.m., while an earlier report from the same publication said police put it at around 8:30 a.m. in the 5900 block of Southeast 136th Avenue.
McGruder was inside the house when she heard gunfire and looked outside to see a neighbor she recognized firing a gun toward her, according to the earlier report. Hill was rushed to Oregon Health & Science University, where she later died.
A Neighbor She Once Welcomed Into Her Home
McGruder told the outlet that Gates had previously been familiar to the household and had spent time there playing video games and helping set up a basketball hoop. Gates's brother had also stayed at Hill and McGruder's home for several months, reflecting the families' earlier closeness before the falling out that preceded the shooting.
Gates was 18 at the time of the shooting. He turned himself in two days later and was arrested, after police had spent a day searching for him without success.
Remembering LaToya Hill
Hill and McGruder had co-parented four daughters together. Hill grew up in Portland and graduated from Grant High School before playing basketball at Clackamas Community College, where she set multiple school records, including 220 assists during the 2005 season — a mark that has stood since. Friends and family described her as someone who brought laughter into every room she entered.
The case follows other Portland-area killings and attempted killings connected to disputes involving neighbors. In 2024, a Portland man convicted in a triple killing of neighbors received three consecutive true-life sentences, according to OregonLive.com. In a separate case outside Portland, a St. Helens man was sentenced to 12.5 years for attempting to murder his neighbor, according to KOIN. The Oregonian/OregonLive also reported that a Gresham man was convicted in two separate Southeast Portland killings in May 2019, including the fatal shooting of an acquaintance during a dispute; that case involved different victims, circumstances and charges from Gates' case.
What Portland's official data can show
For Portland, the Portland Police Bureau's reported-crime dashboards provide annual and rolling-year comparisons and can be filtered by crime, neighborhood, council district and date range. The supplied data does not establish specific 2024 or 2025 homicide totals or countywide Multnomah County figures, so those numbers should not be inferred from this case.
The bureau's shooting-incident dashboard covers firearm discharges reported to Portland police and can be filtered for firearm-related injuries, but excludes incidents with a firearm-related suicide nexus. That definition matters when comparing shooting figures across years or with totals from other jurisdictions.
