Linda Sperling snuggles with her daughter’s 10-week-old puppy, Amelia, in the living room of her Brush Prairie home. A few weeks after being shot in the head while doing yard work in her own backyard, Sperling says she feels lucky to be alive.
“We’re not anti-gun. We’re anti getting shot in our yard. This is an issue of safety.”
– Brush Prairie resident Linda Sperling
Linda Sperling had convinced herself that she was safe. After all, she’d lived next to the rifle range for more than 40 years.
Sure, she knew that bullet fragments often made their way into her yard and had even embedded themselves in the side of her house on a few occasions. But the thought that she might actually be hit by a stray bullet seemed impossible.
“I’m an outside person and I guess I’d just learned to live with it,” Linda says of living just a few yards from the northern edge of the Clark Rifles outdoor shooting range in Brush Prairie. “I’d convinced myself that one would never hit me.”
On a clear, sunny Monday afternoon in late January, Linda realized she’d been fooling herself for four decades.
The 65-year-old grandmother of three was outside her home, doing some yardwork, when she heard an explosion.
“It sounded like my head had exploded,” Linda recalls. “I put my hand up to my head and realized I was bleeding. But I couldn’t feel it yet. Shock, maybe.”
Linda’s husband, Mike Sperling, says he remembers the horror of watching his wife come into their kitchen that afternoon.
“She was dazed,” Mike says. “I was sitting right here (in the couple’s living room) and she came into the kitchen. Her glove was bloody and then I saw her head and called 9-1-1.”
Linda had been shot. The bullet had entered the back of her scalp, just above her right ear, and made a swift exit. Miraculously, Linda was still walking and talking after being shot in the head. The quick in-and-out of the bullet had resulted in a nasty concussion and a lot of blood, but the outcome could have been so much worse.
“If I’d been standing a few inches to the right, or if I’d turned my head,” Sperling says, shaking her head at the thought of what could have been.
A few weeks after the shooting, Linda says she’s still afraid of going into the portion of her yard that is exposed to the nearby rifle range. She is having trouble reading and has made an appointment to see a specialist at Oregon Health Sciences University to help retrain her eyes.
Mike, a Vietnam veteran, says he understands the post traumatic stress his wife seems to be experiencing.
“I get it,” Mike says, looking at his longtime life partner. “She’s been through something that will take time to heal.”
‘They need to be shut down and never reopen’
Once Mike Sperling had figured out that his wife was going to be OK, after he’d called 9-1-1 and knew an ambulance was headed to the couple’s home, Sperling’s attention shifted.
“I was upset. Really upset,” Mike says. “I called the rifle range and I told them what had happened. I demanded that they shut down.”
The Sperlings say that, to the best of their knowledge, the rifle range did cease shooting that day. But the issue was far from over.
The Clark County Sheriff’s Office responded to the incident and interviewed the Sperlings and several people associated with the nearby rifle range. In the end, the Sheriff’s Office determined that Linda’s injury was “most likely caused by a projectile of which the origin and direction of travel cannot be determined.”
In a press release sent to media two weeks after Linda’s shooting, the Sheriff’s Office stated that they were unable to determine that Linda’s injuries were the result of criminal intent, recklessness or negligence. However, the investigators stated that, “given the proximity of Clark Rifles range to the (Sperlings’) property, an errant projectile from the range cannot be excluded as a possibility.”
Mike Sperling says he is outraged that the Sheriff’s Office couldn’t find any hint of negligence on the part of the rifle range.
“The Sheriff’s Office needs to do something about this,” Mike says. “We’ve found more than four pounds worth of bullets on our property over the years. And now my wife has been shot. In the head. For many years, we were willing to meet in the middle, to say that there was a fix. But now, I’m convinced that no band-aid is going to fix this. They just can’t control the people over there. They can’t control where the bullets are going. They’ve proven that they can’t be safe.”
Linda agrees. She says that she and her husband are not “anti-gun” people. Mike is former military and is a hunter.
“We’re not anti-gun,” Linda says. “We’re anti getting shot in our yard. This is an issue of safety.”
Since the news of Linda’s shooting first broke, the couple says they’ve read comments – and heard from people – questioning why they moved next to a rifle range in the first place.
The Sperlings moved to their property in 1971, when Linda was pregnant with the couple’s eldest of two children. For many years, the Sperlings say, the rifle range was not an issue. There was noise, sure, but they had moved next the range knowing that they’d have to put up with a little noise. That didn’t bother them. But, the couple says, the current shooting range is not the range they moved next to more than 40 years ago.
“They’ve outgrown the space,” Mike says. “They have too many people over there, they open it up to the public on the weekends, and they have proven that they can’t control what’s going on over there.”
Although the shooting range has a required earthen berm and wooden wall (the wall was added about 6 years ago, according to the Sperlings) in between the rifle range and the Sperlings’ home, the couple says they’ve found bullets scattered throughout their property and that neighbors have had vehicles hit by bullets in the past. The issue has become so commonplace at the Sperling home, that when their son helped build the couple’s chicken coop, he painted an ironic sign on the coop’s front door, naming it the “Ricochet Ranch.”
“It’s just out of control,” Mike says. “They need to shut down and never reopen.”
Inspections lacking at rifle range
During the investigation into Linda’s shooting, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office discovered that the rifle range, which is permitted through the Clark County Community Development office and required to be inspected by the sheriff at least once every five years, had not been inspected since 1996.
According to the Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Chuck Atkins has requested a review of past practices to determine why his office had not kept up on the required inspections.
In a press release sent to media on Feb. 9, Atkins stated: “We are going to adhere to the county code and conduct the required firing range inspections. We should have been doing them before but we weren’t. Obviously, I can’t change the past, but I can ensure that we follow the county code going forward.”
Atkins requested that Clark Rifles close the rifle range until the required inspection was completed. The pistol portion of the range, which is reserved for members only and not open to the public, was allowed to remain open.
On Fri., Feb. 13, Bob Kadow, president of Clark Rifles, Inc., said he could not comment on the results of the sheriff’s investigation, only that it had been conducted during the past week and that the Sheriff’s Office had completed their report. Kadow said that, under the advice of the rifle range’s attorney, he could not make any additional comments.
As of The Reflector’s Feb. 13 deadline, the Sheriff’s Office had not yet released the results of their most recent inspection of the rifle range.
The Sperlings are convinced that the local law enforcement officials charged with ensuring the rifle range’s safety are not going to help them.
“They say that they (the range) know where the bullets go. They say it’s safe. That we can’t be hurt from a ricocheting bullet,” Mike says. “This has proven them wrong.”
The couple says they are prepared to file a lawsuit against the rifle range if it comes to that.
“Best case scenario?” Linda says, as she sits on her couch, listening to the sound of pistols being fired at the next-door rifle range. “They close down and never reopen again.”
