'These guys were all friends, and then something went wrong'
Details of the Oct. 13 incident remain scarce, but one thing is certain: Friends and family who knew the victims and the accused have unanswered questions
By Erin Golden / The Bulletin
Last modified: October 25. 2009 5:38AM PST
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As she pulled up to a stoplight in Bend on her way home from work Oct. 13, Rhonda Chesney looked out the window and saw her brother, David “Too-Tall” Wade, riding by on his bicycle.
She honked the horn and waved. He turned his head, smiled broadly and waved back.
It was the last time Chesney would ever see her brother.
A few hours later, Wade, 59, and his longtime friend, Greg Spikerman, 55, were stabbed to death in the homeless camp they'd lived in for years, just south of the Bend city limits.
That evening, a third resident of the camp, 37-year-old Jason Centrone, was arrested for criminal trespassing and then, according to documents filed by investigators, told police that he'd killed two people.
Centrone is being held without bail in the Deschutes County jail on charges of aggravated murder and unlawful use of a weapon. He is scheduled to enter pleas on the charges Nov. 23.
A police report and search warrant affidavit offer some details about the stabbings. But nearly two weeks later, family members, friends and others who knew all three men still have plenty of unanswered questions about what might have gone wrong around the campfire that Tuesday evening.
Too-Tall and Greggy
Growing up in the Southern California community of San Bernardino, Wade was the typpe of kid who always had something to say.
“David was called ‘Gabby' when he was growing up because he never stopped talking. ... He just never shut up,” Chesney said. “He'd walk down the street, and if you were a stranger, you got a smile and a ‘hi.'”
After he graduated from high school, Wade went into business as a fencing contractor, married, and had two children, now 28 and 23, Chesney said.
In 1999, divorced from his wife, Wade decided to move to Bend to join his sister and his mother. For about five years, he lived with Chesney and had a series of jobs, including stints at a cabinet shop, a gas station and a janitorial company.
Not long after he moved to Bend, Wade met Spikerman, who then was living in a trailer at his mother's house near Chesney's home. She said the two quickly became friends.
“Greg and David spent many, many holidays sitting at our table, at Christmas and Thanksgiving,” Chesney said.
Chesney learned that Spikerman had also grown up in Southern California and moved to Bend in the mid-1970s. Wade told her Spikerman had been in a bad motorcycle accident that left him with some permanent brain damage, but she said she noticed only that Spikerman was sometimes slower to express his thoughts than other people.
In the mid-1990s, Spikerman worked as a dishwasher at Jake's Diner, where owner Lyle Hicks remembers him as a quiet man and a hard worker.
“I never had a problem with Greg,” Hicks said. “He would get frustrated, no different than anybody else. My recollection of him as an employee was that he was a pretty exceptional employee.”
About five years ago, both men started living in homeless camps around Bend.
Chesney said the move was prompted by a number of factors, including Spikerman's mother selling her home and moving out of the area. Around the same time, Chesney decided it was time to give Wade some “tough love” and let him strike out on his own. Both men were heavy drinkers and had drunken driving arrests on their records.
Over the years, both men would sometimes leave the camps and stay in a motel or with friends. But for the most part, they embraced life in the camps.
“The homeless life was what he chose,” said Hicks, who remembers chatting with Spikerman a few years after he'd stopped working at Jake's. “He didn't want to be told what to do. He wanted the freedom of being able to do what he wanted to do. I offered him a job back, and he basically turned it down with that statement: I like what I am, and what I'm doing.”
In the camps, where many people acquire new nicknames, Spikerman became known as Greggy. The lanky Wade, who stood about 6 feet 6 inches tall, picked up a new name of his own: Too-Tall.
The homeless community
In the camps, people knew if they found one of the pair, the other probably wasn't far away.
At the Baker Road camp, located just off U.S. Highway 97 in a wooded area bordered by railroad tracks and the road, Spikerman and Wade were two of about a half-dozen regular residents.
“It was almost like they were husband and wife,” said Dave Duffey, 47, who lives in the camp and knew Spikerman and Wade for about five years. “They were always together, and they'd fight like an old couple.”
During the day, Spikerman and Wade spent their time walking and biking around Bend, collecting cans and, particularly in Wade's case, chatting with anyone and everyone who would listen.
Kristen Sanchez, a checker at Grocery Outlet on Third Street, said she usually saw Wade about three times a week, when he'd stop by to pick up some food. She said sometimes he'd bum a cigarette from her, and when she'd take a break, they'd stand outside talking, sometimes about his daughter.
On the day he died, Wade came in the store with a younger man, Sanchez said, to purchase some food and a bottle of wine.
Down the street at 7-Eleven, sales associate Rachel Greaney said Spikerman was a regular customer who often picked up cigarettes and beer.
“He was an awesome, sweet, respectful guy,” she said.
On Sundays, the pair would often stop by Bend's Community Center for a warm meal.
“Too-Tall was everybody's favorite — everybody loved Too-Tall,” said Taffy Gleason, the center's executive director. “He was just a kindhearted, gregarious, outgoing, fun-loving man. He would help anybody and everybody, and all the homeless loved him. If you could pick one homeless person that stands out amongst the crowd, it would be Too-Tall.”
Gleason said Spikerman usually kept to himself, but she said Wade sometimes talked about his past and his struggles with alcohol and finding the right resources to deal with his problems.
“Basically, all he would say is, ‘I've made choices in my life and I'm not the smartest man, not the best man, but I'm a decent man,' and it was true,” she said.
The suspect
Some Sundays, Gleason said another resident of the Baker Road camp would show up for a meal: Centrone, the man charged in the murders of Spikerman and Wade.
“He came in and was always polite, never caused any problems and was always appreciative of the food,” she said. “He kept more to himself than most of them and wasn't as friendly, but a lot of (the homeless) have been around each other for years, so it's always, ‘Hi, how you doing' kind of stuff. And this guy wasn't like that. We didn't see him having very many friends.”
At the camp, however, residents said Centrone had plenty of fans.
Charles “Dale” Sizemore, 46, who has lived in the Baker Road camp off and on for the past few years, said Centrone, a relative newcomer, won the respect of others because he was willing to help them.
Sizemore said Centrone often volunteered to hike into Bend and drop off cans or get food for others who had a hard time walking. He dug a garbage pit to help keep the camp clean and stacked rocks into elaborate walls.
With sticks, scraps of wood and a tarp, he built a shelter that was close to the highway but nearly invisible to people who weren't looking for it.
Duffey said he first met Centrone in spring 2008. As the two got to know each other, Centrone told him about his life in upstate New York, where he'd grown up, and mentioned attending college in Ohio. Centrone said, though the details couldn't be verified, that he'd studied music and religion in college and had nearly completed a master's degree in psychology but hadn't completed his thesis.
Duffey said he was impressed by how much Centrone seemed to know about a wide variety of subjects, from Buddhism to classical music and carpentry, the trade he worked in when he moved from New York to Portland a few years earlier.
Centrone often helped fix things around the camp, Duffey said. “If he was here, that would be fixed,” he said, pointing to a broken chair near his tent.
Centrone's most visible mark on the camp was in the artwork he created around the area: statues made of rusty cans and railroad materials, a wind chime with pieces of old metal and arches made of rocks picked to fit together perfectly.
Duffey said Centrone was usually friendly and easygoing, though he went through phases where he seemed depressed, and he'd take off to hike in the mountains for a couple days. He told Duffey he'd thought of killing himself back in Portland, after he injured his arm, developed a staph infection and maxed out his credit card trying to pay the medical bills.
Centrone burned his ID and got rid of his money, but then decided he wanted to live, so he headed to Central Oregon.
Duffey said he and Centrone had gotten in a big argument a few weeks before the stabbings, but until then, he'd never known him to be angry or violent.
After the argument, Centrone moved to another area of the camp, and Spikerman and Wade moved into Centrone's former campsite.
When he heard Spikerman and Wade were dead, and that Centrone had been arrested, Sizemore said he and others in the camp couldn't believe it.
“The way I see it, these guys were all friends, and then something went wrong,” Sizemore said.
The arrest
Around 8:30 p.m. Oct. 13, police were called to Walmart in south Bend to check a report of a man who said he had a warrant out for his arrest and wanted to turn himself in, according to a report filed by Officer Joseph Schneider.
The man identified himself as Jason Centrone and said he'd been drinking and then said he'd used a knife to stab someone in the south part of the county.
Schneider called for other officers and asked dispatchers to check for reports of stabbings, but nothing turned up.
According to court records, Centrone's only other run-in with the law in Oregon was for a parking ticket in Portland in 2006.
For a while, the officers believed Centrone had made up the stabbing as a way to get their attention and find a warm place to sleep for the night, the report said.
Centrone refused to leave the store, so the officers arrested him on criminal trespassing charges.
In the back of the police car, Centrone started talking again. He told Schneider he'd woken up that day and decided to kill someone, but had nothing against the person he'd killed, according to the report.
Centrone was booked at the Deschutes County jail, and deputies from the Deschutes County Sheriff's Office were called in to talk to Centrone.
According to a search warrant affidavit filed by Deputy Tim Leak, Centrone again repeated that he'd killed someone and then provided more specifics about the location: the Baker Road camp.
Around 11 p.m., deputies responded to the scene and found a group of tents around a still-smoldering fire, a small barbecue that had been knocked over and the bodies of Spikerman and Wade, the affidavit said. One of the men was found inside a tent, while the other was just outside the tent's entrance.
The affidavit doesn't mention anyone else being present at the campsite when police arrived, though officials later interviewed two men who had been camping nearby.
Back at the jail, deputies interviewed Centrone again, and he told them that he'd “lost it after years of frustration building up.”
“Centrone told us he decided no one in the camp was getting any better or would become any better, so he decided it would be best for them all to start over,” Leak wrote.
The next day, Centrone was arraigned in Deschutes County Circuit Court on two counts each of aggravated murder and unlawful use of a weapon.
He was appointed an attorney, Geoff Gokey, who could not be reached for comment Friday.
Grieving
It's not clear exactly what led to the stabbings, and the victims' family members and friends say they're still grappling with the shock of the deaths.
But Chesney said something surprisingly positive has also come out of her brother's death.
Over the past several days, she's traveled around the community talking to people who knew Spikerman and Wade, and she said she's been amazed to discover how many people had known them and enjoyed their company.
She's also found that the deaths have prompted some bad-mouthing of homeless people in Bend. But she's glad it's made people talk and think about the issue — and perhaps, what they can do to help.
“I think they had a purpose,” Chesney said of Spikerman and Wade. “The people out there that don't know the homeless need to hear the good side rather than all of this slamming of the homeless and how scary they are.
“That stabbing could have happened at the college. That stabbing could have happened downtown. It could have happened anywhere, and because it happened in a homeless camp, there's a lot of talk around town that they're so scary and need to be escorted out of town and this and that. But I think there's a lot of other ways to help people like that. ...
“They're good people, they've got good hearts, and a lot of them do choose to live that way for various reasons.”
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