Let me make sure I’ve got this straight, because I want to be real clear before I start asking questions of whoever’s in charge here.
A man with prior convictions for car theft and business burglaries crawls through a broken garage door into somebody else’s shop before dawn. He admits he grabbed a drill bag and meant to walk off with it. The 72-year-old Army veteran who owns the place confronts him, gets threatened with bolt cutters, and shoots him three times. The burglar gets convicted of first-degree burglary and menacing. The veteran never gets charged with a single crime.
Open and shut, right? Man defends his property, criminal goes to court, justice gets served. We all go home.
Not in Portland, Oregon, bless their hearts. Not in 2025.
Now the burglar, Kenneth Voyles, is suing the veteran, James Grant, for $10 million. Five million in compensatory damages, five million in punitive. Because apparently in this country, you can break into a man’s livelihood, get caught red-handed, get convicted in criminal court for doing it, and then turn around and tell a civil jury that the real victim here is you.
I have questions.
Question one: How does a man who was convicted of burglarizing this exact building get to sue the owner of this exact building for what happened while he was burglarizing it? I’m not a lawyer. I’m a person with eyes. And my eyes tell me this is upside down and backwards.
Voyles says he was just looking for warmth and food. He was homeless, his lawyers say. He needed help. Well, I’ve got sympathy for hard times. I really do. But sympathy doesn’t explain the drill bag he admits he picked up and planned to take. You don’t steal from a man’s shop because you’re cold. You ask for help. You go to a shelter. You don’t crawl through a broken garage door at dawn and then act shocked when the owner isn’t thrilled to see you.
Petar Milošević This photograph was taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-G85/G80 (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsNow, I’ll be fair. The lawsuit claims Grant threw a cup of urine at Voyles, tossed heavy tiles at him, left the room to get his gun, came back, and opened fire. Voyles says Grant told him, “You’re going to die, dude.” If that’s exactly how it went down, a jury should sort through it. That’s what juries are for.
But here’s what Grant says happened. He told the man to get on the ground. Voyles raised a pair of bolt cutters and moved toward him. Grant wasn’t even wearing his hearing aids. He’s 72 years old, alone in his shop, staring down a younger man with a criminal history and a weapon in his hand. “He looked very agitated, looked like he was getting ready to attack me,” Grant testified. “Then, I shot three times.”
That’s a man who was afraid. That’s a man who didn’t want to die in his own shop.
And here’s the part that ought to make every small business owner in this country sit up and pay attention. Oregon law says you can use lethal force to defend your home from an intruder. But a business? Different story. Different rules. Grant testified he lives in the back room of that shop when he’s in Portland. He owns houses in Nevada and China, but when he’s in town, that shop is his home. So now a jury has to decide whether a man’s dwelling counts as a dwelling if it also has a business sign out front.
That’s the question. Not whether Voyles broke in. He did, and a criminal court already said so. Not whether Grant was justified. The police and prosecutors already decided that one. The question is whether a technicality in Oregon statute gives a convicted burglar a ten-million-dollar payday because the building he chose to rob had a commercial address.
If that doesn’t make your blood boil, check your pulse.
A man works his whole life. Serves his country. Builds a business with his own two hands. A repeat offender breaks in and gets shot for his trouble. The system works the way it’s supposed to for once. The criminal gets convicted. The veteran walks free. And then the civil courts open their doors and say, “Tell us more about your suffering, sir. How much money would make this right?”
James Grant defended what was his. Kenneth Voyles was convicted of violating it. And now a Portland jury is being asked to make the victim pay the burglar ten million dollars for the privilege of having been robbed.
Only in America. And only because we keep letting it happen.