Portland Police put out a public call this week for help identifying two people connected to an overdose investigation, posting images with a simple appeal: can you ID me? The bureau has not released further details about the circumstances of the case, the identities of the people pictured, or what role investigators believe they played.
What Portland Police Have Said So Far
The request, titled Press Release: PPB Requests Help Identifying Two Persons of Interest in Overdose Investigation, was posted by Portland Police
on Friday night.
Portland Police have made similar public appeals before. In the spring of 2025, the bureau said it needed the public's help locating two individuals wanted in connection with a non-fatal fentanyl overdose involving their child, according to a notice on portland.gov. It is not clear from available information whether that earlier case is connected in any way to the persons of interest named in this week's post.
A City Already Grappling With Fentanyl's Toll
The appeal lands against a backdrop of mounting overdose cases across the Portland area that have drawn scrutiny for months. An AP News report has said Portland police were investigating nearly a dozen fentanyl overdoses involving children, five of which were fatal, underscoring how the crisis has reached some of the city's youngest residents.
One of those cases involved 's body was found on May 4, after he had been reported missing in March, according to KOIN. The outlet reported that the Medical Examiner had not confirmed his cause of death, but investigators believed, based on evidence at the scene, that it was the result of a fentanyl overdose. Owings, who also went by “Jabber” on the streets, was believed to have gone missing in Tigard and was later reported in locations around the Portland metro area, including the East River Promenade and homeless camps near the Hawthorne Bridge.
PPB Detective Jordan Zaitz told the station that a passerby called 911 after noticing Owings lying down and sensing something was wrong: “a passer by saw him laying down and just noticed that something didn't look right. And so they decided to call 911.” Detectives, per the same report, are now searching for the person who sold Owings the drugs investigators believe killed him.
Overdose Numbers Tell a Grim Local Story
The scale of the fentanyl crisis in the Portland area has been documented in county-level data. Multnomah County reported a total of 868 people who died from fentanyl overdoses between 2018 and partial 2023 figures, according to the county's own mortality report. Monthly fentanyl-overdose deaths in the county rose from just two a month in 2018 and 2019 to 22 a month by 2022, and nearly 36 a month provisionally in 2023, the county said.
The same report found that the share of fentanyl-overdose deaths involving another drug climbed from 27% in 2018 to 63% in 2023, and that the proportion of fentanyl deaths among people likely experiencing houselessness rose from 20% in 2022 to a provisional 25% in 2023. Multnomah County also found that most fentanyl-overdose deaths in 2023 occurred in downtown Portland, particularly in the Old Town and Pearl District neighborhoods, with the highest numbers of deaths in 2021 and 2022 recorded among people ages 35 to 54.
More recent state-level figures suggest a different trajectory. A snippet from the Oregon Health Authority indicates that statewide overdose deaths decreased over the past two years, with preliminary data showing around 1,100 deaths in 2025, representing what the agency described as a continued downward trend, though the full dataset behind that figure was not made available. The agency has also referenced a document titled Overdose Crisis in Oregon: 2025 Report to the Legislature, dated January 2026.
For now, the identities of the two persons of interest named in this week's Portland Police post remain unknown to the public, and the bureau has not said what specific information it is seeking from anyone who might recognize them.
