New DNA testing identifies man at 1995 murder scene outside Springfield

This story has been updated to include comments from Jon Shores, son of Joni Grigsby, the Springfield woman slain in 1995.

A DNA match connecting a man killed in a 2004 police shootout to a decade-earlier murder scene outside Springfield has closed the case on the unsolved slaying of 33-year-old Joni Marie Grigsby, the Lane County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday, June 11.

Grigsby’s body was found a little after 9 p.m. June 2, 1995, near the Willamette River, with detectives ruling her death a homicide, the sheriff’s office said in a news release. A 1995 news article published in The Register-Guard described Grigsby as being found in tall grass on the Glenwood side of the Main Street Bridge.

Grigsby’s oldest son, Jon Shores, 44, had just turned 13 when his mother died.

“Part of it is a chills down my spine feeling, that she’s been in a better place for a long time,” Shores said in a phone interview. “She’s not hurting anymore.”

Shores said his parents divorced when he was about 4 or 5, and at the time of his mother’s death, he said he had not seen her in about two years.

Shores said he did not know about the DNA findings until told by Lookout, and he planned to share the news with his younger brother, David.

“We were both young and didn’t have very much time with her,” Shores said.

Detectives in 2023 sent DNA samples from the crime scene to an outside laboratory for testing. Results “narrowed the field of suspects to a small handful,” the sheriff’s office said.

Among the suspects was Roy Gomes, who died in a 2004 while on parole after a confrontation with police in Sacramento, California. During his autopsy, authorities collected a DNA sample from Gomes.

Lane County sheriff’s “Cold Case Detectives obtained a copy of Gomes’ DNA sample and submitted it for comparison against the samples obtained from the crime scene,” the sheriff’s office said.

“Lab analysis confirmed Gomes’ DNA matched what was found at the scene of Grigsby’s murder. Joni Grigsby’s family have been notified of the updates and results of this investigation,” the sheriff’s office said.

Shores said he’s “never” heard from sheriff’s office investigators.

He said an uncle, Rob, took the lead in dealing with the sheriff’s office, while he and his brother were left out completely. Shores recalled how “people were trying to guard me as a kid.”

His mother “dabbled in the party lifestyle quite a bit” and was incarcerated “a couple of times for doing bad things,” Shores said.

The “life that she chose and path that she went down wasn’t meant for her, but it’s what happens,” Shores said.

He said he eventually reached out to people who knew his mother and, in the early 2000s, to the sheriff’s office during a time when he was no longer living near Lane County.

“I had to do my own investigation, on my own time,” said Shores, now living in Missouri.

“It got to be too painful,” Shores recalled.

Told some details about the man now linked through DNA to his mother’s murder, Shores said, “I have seen the name before. I don’t remember any specifics about the guy.”

He thinks Gomes may have been among the people his mother knew at one time.

Shores described the DNA match as a result “karma or God or whatever you want to call it.”

“But another part of me wonders if that’s the whole thing,” or if others possibly were involved.

Shores spoke about his mother’s absence in his and his brother’s life, and also how when they were with her “she would go out and party [and] wasn’t really there to watch over us like she should have been.”

But he also said his mother lost her mother to cancer when he and his brother were very young.

“She was hurting a lot,” Shores said. “I just think of her being in heaven watching over me, and one day I’ll see her again.”

The investigation involved volunteers, retired officers and detectives who seek leads to solve old cases and whose work is funded through donations, the sheriff’s office said.

According to newspaper archives, Grigsby was born in Long Beach, California, and lived in Springfield at the time of her death.

Grigsby was described as a homemaker with two sons, who also worked as a waitress, according to a memorial announcement.

A 2004 Sacramento Bee article about the shooting death of the 37-year-old Gomes described officer interviews as part of the city’s Office of Police Accountability. Officers said that after a foot chase, they ordered Gomes to get on the ground. An officer used a Taser to shock Gomes, who threw rocks at police.

One officer said he saw Gomes pull out a knife and begin a motion to hurl it. The officer who shot Gomes said he saw Gomes about to throw a metal-like object, so he shot at Gomes, hitting him in the chest. A review of the shooting found no violations of Sacramento Police Department policy.