Craig Coyner III once helped govern the city of Bend, ascending to its highest office.
He served as a Bend city councilor from 1981 through 1992. He was mayor for a year in 1984, following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, who was the mayor in 1911.
For more than 30 years, his former colleagues say, he was a sharp, creative and dogged force in the Deschutes County Courthouse, first as a prosecutor and later as a defense attorney. He was known to represent even the most despicable criminals.
But in the twilight of his life, Coyner disappeared from the lives of those who knew and loved him.
Coyner experienced homelessness, the culmination of what loved ones describe as several compounding factors: family conflict, mental illness, substance abuse, the Great Recession and the death of his second wife in 2008.
They were married for 23 years. Coyner never fully recovered from losing her, his siblings say.
On Jan. 13, Coyner was admitted to St. Charles Bend with frozen feet, health care workers told his family.
It’s unclear to his family what happened, but at least one of his frostbitten toes was amputated.
During his stay, Coyner suffered severe alcohol withdrawal and had a stroke.
He lived the final days of his life in the hospital, hardly able to move or speak.
Coyner died Feb. 14. He was 75.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said his younger brother, Tad Coyner, 58, an engineer who lives in Anacortes, Washington. “It’s sad that it ended up like that. He had so much to give.”
SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
In 2022, at least 19 people died while experiencing homelessness in Central Oregon, according to state data. Coyner is, almost certainly, among the first this year to add to that grim total.
His death has his family and friends searching for answers in the way he lived. How could a man once revered in his community have fallen so far?
“I’m angry at myself for not jumping in,” said his younger sister, Kristen Coyner, 48, a controller at Mackin’s Auto Body in Vancouver, Washington. “We live a really nice comfortable life up here, and I could have helped. My brothers live nice comfortable lives, and we could have helped. I don’t know if he ever would have taken it, but I’m angry with myself and I’m angry with the system.”
A U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served stateside during the Vietnam War, Coyner’s death underscores a truth often voiced by advocates for people experiencing homelessness.
“It can happen to any of us,” said Terry Rahmsdorff, a longtime friend and co-worker at the public defender’s office in Deschutes County.
Coyner, a Bend native and graduate of Bend High School, lived his life among his family’s legacy.
There were the buildings across town his family developed or once owned. There is the Bend Parkway, the city’s central thoroughfare, which he and his family helped design. There is Coyner Trail, which stretches near parks, an elementary school, a fitness center, a skate park and senior center. There is what longtime locals know as Coyner Point, a patch of land that juts out into the west side of the Deschutes River near Drake Park. There are two roads among farmlands in Redmond called Coyner Avenue.
MENTAL ILLNESS, CRIMINAL CHARGES
He was no saint, though. He was seldom involved in the lives of his two daughters, Catherine Emick and Elizabeth Smith. As he struggled with mental illness, he threatened health care workers and a former colleague.
He was convicted of seven misdemeanors and one felony, for firing a gun within Bend city limits. He was disciplined by the Oregon State Bar for repeatedly failing in his duties as a defense attorney. His license was suspended in the late 2000s and was never reinstated.
But this isn’t the Craig Coyner his family and friends want the community to remember.
Oregon Supreme Court Justice Roger DeHoog worked with Coyner when the justice’s career began at the public defender’s office in Deschutes County in the 1990s. “He was one of the people who impressed upon me to dig deeply into police reports, the lives of the people involved in cases and not leave any stone unturned,” DeHoog told The Bulletin.
However, he added: “It does sound like somewhere, perhaps many places, there were opportunities to help him that we didn’t take advantage of.”
Many people tried to help Coyner in the final years of his life, as he lived in parking lots, motel rooms and shelters, service providers and his loved ones say. He always seemed to drift away.
Twice, Tad Coyner came to Bend, but his big brother would only talk to him through a door or over a fence. Kristen Coyner left her brother phone messages that went unreturned. She came to town and tried to find him. She didn’t.
Now Coyner’s loved ones are picking up the pieces of a man who, for a time, they hardly knew.
“I want people to remember who he was before he was what he became,” said Kristen Coyner.
His family were homesteaders, mill workers, farmers and developers who arrived in Central Oregon in the late 1800s. His father, a lawyer, owned a law firm and the building that is now the Tower Theater in downtown Bend.
When Coyner was young, his sister fell out of a tree and spent most of her life in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. She died in the mid-1970s. After surviving polio, his mother died of cancer in 1973. Within two years of her death, Coyner’s father remarried. Coyner was irate. His relationship with his father soured, his siblings say.
“That was the knife that went between them,” Tad Coyner said.
Coyner attended Lewis & Clark Law School. Around this time, he married his first wife, Carolyn. They had two children but later divorced. He graduated in the mid-1970s and went to work at his father’s law firm. He became a deputy district attorney and city councilor.
PUBLIC SERVICE
In politics, Coyner’s focus was Bend’s gathering spaces: walking paths, hiking paths, parks. Many are still used today, his family and colleagues said.
In the mid-1980s, he married a radio advertising saleswoman with a delightful Texas accent named Patricia.
“Patty was his entire world,” Kristen Coyner said. “They were the most adorable couple. She kept him in place. And he needed somebody like her because she was strong.”
DeHoog, the Supreme Court Justice, got to know Coyner in the early 1990s while working late nights together at the public defender’s office. A gifted speaker, Coyner would share his experiences from court with DeHoog.
“He was just spellbinding,” said DeHoog, who added: “He really had that energy and that desire to dig deep.”
But during Coyner’s time as a public defender, his family and friends saw Coyner’s mental health deteriorate. He fought with his colleagues and made serious mistakes. After the Oregon Supreme Court suspended his license in 2006 for nine ethics violations, Coyner took responsibility. He disclosed publicly that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had been self-medicating with alcohol.
As Coyner went into private practice, he drifted away from his former colleagues. When the housing market crashed, he began doing pro-bono work for people losing their homes, working with mortgage companies and outreach groups, trying to help people understand the legal process of foreclosure. He even began allowing people to stay in his backyard in his home across from Stover Park off Watson Drive. The neighbors weren’t thrilled and authorities took notice, his sister said.
WIFE’S DEATH
March 18, 2008, brought a tragedy he found too devastating to overcome. Coyner’s wife died of cirrhosis, likely caused by their heavy drinking, his siblings say.
Less than four weeks later, his father died after contracting pneumonia. When Tad Coyner called with the news, his brother said he wouldn’t attend the funeral because he was still grieving his wife’s death. He told his brother he’d been drunk for two weeks and planned to be drunk for days to come.
While Coyner fought for homeowners amid the recession, his license to practice law was suspended and he struggled to pay bills on his home, records show. For nearly a decade, he fought in court to keep his home, where he had lived since 1974.
In 2015, a mortgage company foreclosed on Coyner’s house.
“In the end of his life, he gave and gave and gave himself but probably didn’t help himself,” said Kristen Coyner.
Catherine Emick hadn’t seen her father in 25 years on the day she found herself strolling near Deschutes County’s behavioral health building in Bend.
And there he was.
Somehow, on that sunny spring day five years ago, she knew it was her father, and Coyner knew she was his youngest daughter. They exchanged phone numbers and arranged to meet for the first time since she was a teenager.
She had so many questions.
Over drinks at the McMenamins Old St. Francis School in downtown Bend — he had a beer and she a lemonade — he told her stories for hours. He voiced a passion for fighting for the underdog, just like she did as a steward in the local nurse’s union. She began to understand where she came from in a way she never had before.
“He was more than just a name,” she said. “He was a full human being at that point.”
Emick never knew what Coyner’s sister knew, that her father had long regretted not being in his children’s life, but couldn’t bring himself to make amends because he feared he’d make their lives worse, she said.
DAUGHTER AT BEDSIDE
But during the final weeks of his life, she visited him in the hospital. He would squeeze her hand, rub her fingers and touch her face. She watched him sleep and told him she was sorry that they couldn’t talk more.
That she loved him.
That she wasn’t mad at him in any way.
That she was sorry.
Most of Emick’s memories of her father are fuzzy, like old photographs, she said. Over the past week, she has reached out to his sister, his colleagues, her mother, anyone who has stories or photos of him. She wants to know anything about the man she never really knew, anything that will bring his memory back to life.
“At the end of the day, at least now I know where he is,” she said. “I don’t have to wonder anymore.”
-- Bryce Dole; 541-617-7854; bdole@bendbulletin.com
Bryce Dole is a crime and public safety reporter with The Bulletin. He previously worked as a reporter with the East Oregonian and at The Oregonian/OregonLive. He grew up in Grants Pass and has lived in Oregon all his life.