Kenneth Voyles, a 43-year-old career criminal with a rap sheet that includes car thefts, burglaries, and a meth habit, broke into a Portland granite business at 5:30 in the morning on March 6, 2023. The 70-year-old Army veteran who owned the place shot him three times. Now Voyles is suing the veteran for $10 million.

The burglar is the plaintiff. The victim is the defendant. Welcome to Portland.

James Grant, the business owner who runs Touchstone Granite & Marble Inc., told the court exactly what happened. He heard someone breaking in, confronted the intruder, and gave clear commands. "Get on the ground. Get on the ground. Get on the ground," Grant said. Voyles didn't comply. "Then I shot three times," Grant stated. He also told the court, "My adrenaline was flowing, to just protect myself. I didn't want to do deadly force."

Voyles had methamphetamine in his system at the time of the break-in. His version of events is that Grant was the aggressor — claiming he turned around and Grant told him, "You're going to die." He says he cried out, "Stop! Like, 'Please stop!'" and told the court, "He's assaulting me. He was pretty angry." The man who smashed his way into someone else's business before dawn, high on meth, wants us to believe he was the one being victimized.

The lawsuit demands $5 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Voyles is alleging battery, assault, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress — against the man whose property he was burglarizing. He pleaded no contest to first-degree burglary of a dwelling and menacing for the break-in itself. His criminal history includes over a year in prison for prior car thefts and burglaries. The court gave him five years of drug treatment instead of prison time for this incident.

So the system's theory of the case is: a repeat offender with a documented meth problem and a history of property crimes breaks into a business in the dark, gets shot by a senior citizen defending his livelihood, receives drug treatment instead of a real sentence, and then gets to use the civil courts to extract millions from the guy he robbed.

The "negligence" claim is the one that should make your blood pressure spike. Under Oregon law, a business owner who shoots a burglar inside his own shop can apparently be accused of failing to exercise reasonable care — toward the burglar. The legal framework treats the criminal's safety inside someone else's property as a legitimate interest that the property owner has a duty to protect. That's not a bug in the system. In Portland, that's the feature.

Grant is 70 years old and served in the United States Army. He built a business. He showed up to work. He found a stranger breaking into it before sunrise. He did what millions of Americans would do — defended what was his. For that, he's sitting in a civil courtroom while his burglar's lawyer argues he should pay for the privilege of not being robbed quietly.

In Portland, the only crime is fighting back.