Helen Fenn was driving through Owyhee Junction on her way to her Nyssa home on a weekday afternoon when a bullet pierced the rear window of her white Chevrolet.
The Nyssa resident didn’t know at the moment, but she was among the earliest victims of a wild shooting rampage in the rural Malheur County community south of Nyssa.
Over the next several hours on Wednesday, Jan. 22, a mentally disturbed man barricaded in his home peppered the community with hundreds of bullets fired into homes, vehicles and businesses.
His actions prompted one of the largest law enforcement responses in recent eastern Oregon history, as more than 100 police, medics and firefighters evacuated and then sealed off the community.
The end came just before midnight, when police found that Joel E. Brousseau, 58, had taken his own life.
And it brought to an end a family’s struggle for years to help a deeply troubled man.
Life as a loner
Brousseau’s brother, Jay Brousseau of Jordan Valley, in an interview, provided details about the life of his younger brother and Brousseau’s daughter provided information via a written statement to the Enterprise. She asked not to be identified.
Born and raised in Oxnard, California, Brousseau was the youngest of four boys.
Growing up, Brousseau was a “loner” who preferred being out in nature instead of around other people.
He never fully recovered from a childhood friend’s death by suicide. The childhood friend died when Brousseau was a teenager. Later, another close friend was killed in a car accident. Both deaths affected him.
“My father never talked about anything deranged prior to moving to Nyssa.”
–Joel Brousseau’s daughter
He worked for the sanitation district in Ventura County for about five years, one of the only full-time jobs he held.
His daughter said he worked in construction all his life and was “a jack of all trades.”
Around 2000, he moved to Meridian, Idaho, and then at some point decided to move again.
His daughter said he loved the outdoors, and was an avid hunter and fisherman who taught her gun safety.
“He was an excellent marksman,” the daughter said. “He could aim and shoot on the drop of a dime (and not miss).” She said he was “a law-abiding citizen and responsible gun owner throughout his life.”
His brother said Brousseau spent about six months on the Oregon coast. In 2019, according to Malheur County records, he bought a house built in 1940 on Owyhee Avenue, just three doors west of the intersection with Oregon Highway 201. A skilled craftsman, Brousseau reworked the home.
He lived off an inheritance that, according to his brother, was nearly depleted in recent times. He was living month-to-month on credit.
Brousseau suffered from mental illness with his paranoia building over the last three years, his brother said.
“My father never talked about anything deranged prior to moving to Nyssa,” his daughter said.
There were glimmers of hope when Brousseau appeared to realize he needed treatment for possible mental illness.
Each time, Jay Brousseau supported his brother.
“I said, ‘Buddy, let’s go,'” the brother said. ‘”I’ll take you right here and right now.'”
While isolated in his community, he could on occasion be friendly.
Fenn recalled her one interaction with Brousseau.
That was last summer, when she was pulling weeds in her sister’s yard next door to Brousseau. He told her to throw the weeds onto his property and that he would get rid of them for her.
“He was nice to do that for me,” she said.
But Jay Brousseau said his brother’s condition and instability called for caution by relatives. At any moment, his brother’s demeanor could change, and he would blow up.
Last Christmas, Brousseau threatened his brother’s life.
Delusions about his neighbors conspiring against him mounted. That fear dominated conversations with his brother.
About two years ago the troubled man reported his suspicions to the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office.
Brousseau told his brother and his daughter that he reported that people from the community were trespassing on his property. He said that police told him the claims could not be substantiated.
CRISIS HELP: If you are experiencing a crisis, call the Northwest Human Services Hotline at 503-581-5535 or 1-800-560-5535. The National Suicide Prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
“Every time I called him, he would always tell me the same story about different incidents – how he’d leave his home and come back and stuff being in disarray and not how he left it,” the daughter said.
In Brousseau’s mind, that meant nobody would help him, his brother said.
“He didn’t like that at all,” Jay said. “That’s what really probably triggered it.”
His interaction with the sheriff’s office prompted him to foreshadow his intentions in a letter to his daughter in Meridian – precisely two years before the day of the shooting.
The specific contents of the letter couldn’t be established, but his brother said it mapped out what Brousseau planned in Owyhee Junction “to a T.”
The daughter said he wrote about people invading his privacy and “he just wanted help catching them in the act.”
Ahead of the shooting, Brousseau stockpiled hundreds of rounds of ammunition for his high-powered semi-automatic rifle. He also had other weapons, including a shotgun.
He barred entry to his home, pushing furnishings against his front and side doors. He hung sheets on the windows.
And then, he let loose.

Quiet community disrupted
Owyhee Junction is an important crossroad on Oregon Highway 201, which runs north-south near the Idaho border.
The junction is between Nyssa and Adrian, the turnoff for campers, hikers and other recreationists wanting to reach Lake Owyhee to the west.
The Rock Store is its centerpiece, serving up last-minute fuel and groceries to travelers. A bait shop, Rippin’ Lips Tackle, sits across the street. There are a dozen homes and industry along the state highway and Owyhee Avenue, where Brousseau lived.
At mid-afternoon, Tyler Simpson was tending to customers at the store he bought in 2022. He had worked to build on a business running since 1932, upgrading the gas pumps, adding an outdoor patio with a tap house.
He and his employees stepped outside the store at about 2:15 p.m. after he noticed the transformer out front was smoking.
Brousseau was firing at them from his home across the street and about 250 feet from the store. The shooter had been in the store only once in the past four years.
One bullet whizzed by Simpson’s head.
“I was right in his line of sight,” he said.
Bullets also struck the store’s walk-in cooler.
Simpson said he, his customers and staff all moved to take cover on the other side of the building, where they would be pinned down for about an hour before police evacuated them.
They were joined in seeking refuge by Fenn, the passing motorist.
She had taken her golden lab Tango for a walk and now was driving home, pulling up on Owyhee Avenue to the stop sign at the highway intersection.
She heard a rapid popping sound but mistook it for exploding debris in a burn pile.
Fenn went on home, unaware a bullet had pierced her car’s rear window, exiting through the windshield on the passenger side. The back window shattered when she closed the door, prompting her to drive back to The Rock Store to complain.
She drove right into an active shooting.
Meantime, 911 dispatchers were taking one call after another about the shooting. The first was logged at 2:18 p.m.

“We have a shooting that’s going on,” the woman caller reported. “It’s on Owyhee Avenue.”
The dispatcher learned of the car being shot, of power going out in the area, that no one so far had been injured.
More calls came in over the next few moments as a sheriff’s deputy and Oregon State Police troopers responded.
A deputy arrived just 17 minutes after the first call, soon joined by troopers and other deputies. Those at The Rock Store pointed to the shooter’s location.
Brousseau apparently moved from place to place in his house, firing out windows. He pumped an estimated 200 rounds into the home to his east, where a woman cowered behind a washing machine for safety before her rescue.
His gunfire shattered windows in cars, trucks and trailers. He fired at other businesses, from the bait store to a shop 700 feet away that is home to Martin & Martin Builders.
Police and medics figured how to safely remove a man in a home to the west of Brousseau. The man had to be carried out because he was immobilized by illness. Police used an armored vehicle to shield them and the man.
As more police arrived, the community emptied of residents and filled with officers. Traffic in and out was stopped far from the scene. A command post was set up outside an onion shed about a half mile north of the junction.
Authorities later said that shortly after 3 p.m., Brousseau took aim at police officers, firing away.
By then, help was on the way from across Malheur County and throughout eastern Oregon. The Baker County Sheriff’s Office sent its armored vehicle. Troopers from La Grande and Burns started 130-mile trips to get to the scene.
Ontario Fire and Rescue dispatched help that included its drone and Treasure Valley Paramedics staged crews.
Around 5 p.m., an officer not yet identified by authorities exchanged shots with Brousseau and then deputies from Malheur and Baker counties drove two armored vehicles up to Brousseau’s home in an effort to pen him inside.
Police reached Jay Brousseau at his home at around 5:30 p.m., asking him to record a message by phone to his brother. This was the first that Jay Brousseau had heard about the shooting.The plan was to broadcast it at the house to get the gunman to surrender.
The message told Brousseau that his brothers loved him, that they wanted to go fishing with him and spend time together. It’s unclear whether the message was played.
They worked to get a similar recording from the shooter’s daughter.
Later that night, the highly-trained SWAT team from the Oregon State Police moved to end the event, using a specialized armored vehicle that had to travel roughly 400 miles from Salem to reach Owyhee Junction.
Using the vehicle, the troopers rammed the doors and windows. They deployed robots and drones into the house to give them video of what was going on inside.
Around 11:30 p.m., the team found Brousseau dead, apparently having taken his life with gunfire.
Inside, the home was littered with an estimated 300 bullet casings.
Soon, those among the 100 police and first responders on the scene began to leave. Residents were allowed back to their homes.
And state police investigators gathered evidence from Brousseau’s home and around the junction, working through the following day.
The Rock Store remained closed until Saturday, Jan. 25, when power was finally restored.
Malheur County Sheriff Travis Johnson said the shooting prompted the largest law enforcement response he could recall in recent years in eastern Oregon.
No first responders or citizens were injured.
“With that much gunfire into buildings, into houses where people were, we were lucky that no one was hurt,” Johnson said. “I think it’s a miracle.”













CRISIS HELP: If you are experiencing a crisis, call the Northwest Human Services Hotline at 503-581-5535 or 1-800-560-5535. The National Suicide Prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
Editor Les Zaitz contributed to this report.
News tip? Send your information to Steven Mitchell at [email protected].
WE CAN’T DO THIS FOR FREE – The Malheur Enterprise delivers quality local journalism – fair and accurate. We depend on support through subscriptions to deliver our reports. You can read it any hour, any day with a digital subscription. Read it on your phone, your Tablet, your home computer. Click subscribe – $7.50 a month.