This Lawsuit Has Everything, Including a “Cup of Urine” to the Face

When it comes to absurd lawsuits, it truly is the little details and flourishes that put a story over the top. On its face, the just-concluded court battle between a Portland, Oregon burglar and the store owner who shot him three times would already be a timely launchpad for discussion of anything from American gun culture, to the stigmatization of homelessness, to lawful use of force. But then you get to the details of how the confrontation began, and we really set the hook: A burglar walking through a closed granite and marble business in the middle of the night encounters the completely nude, 70-year-old owner, whose first action is to … throw a cup of urine in his face, before going to fetch his gun. Okay, now you’ve got my attention. And also questions.

All of these details spilled out in the recent, seven-day trial between now 72-year-old Touchstone Granite & Marble owner James Grant, and homeless plaintiff Kenneth Voyles, who broke into the Portland stone services shop in the frigid early morning hours of March 2023, saying that he was in search of warmth and food. He ended up with a few bullets in him instead, setting up a civil case several years in the making, in which Voyles and his representation attempted to make the case that Granted had responded to his presence with excessive, lethal force, seeking a $10 million judgement. This week, a Portland jury rejected that ask, siding 10-2 with Grant and effectively finding that the gunfire had been justified. But wait, what was that about a cup of urine being thrown in a man’s face?

As it turns out, Grant, an Army veteran who claims homes in Nevada and China, was also for some reason living in the back room of his stone countertop business at the time, despite the fact that the city of Portland had previously “found him in violation of the industrial district’s zoning rules and told him not to reside there,” according to reporting from The Oregonian. Why this required Grant to piss in a cup by his bedside is not immediately clear, but it was this projectile that Grant then subsequently launched into Voyles’ face when the two encountered each other coming around the corner, in a blatantly absurd moment captured on security video and played in court. I have so many other questions, from “Did other employees at this shop know their boss was living on a cot in a back room?” to “Who wants to buy a marble countertop from a guy living in the backroom of his shop, peeing in a cup?”

Not-so-conveniently for Voyles, and distinctly suspiciously, despite there being video of their initial moments of confrontation, The Oregonian reports that there somehow wasn’t any footage or audio of the shooting itself, with attorneys for Grant claiming in court that “The shooting was not recorded on video or was lost somehow as Portland police tried to retrieve it.” Funny, isn’t it, how the actual moment of contention is the moment where the footage disappears?

This left the rest of the encounter in a purely he-said, he-said situation: Voyles, who had needed to enter the place by prying a board off the building and cutting through several thin metal bars to wriggle through a former doggie door, said he panicked, repeatedly shouted “I’m sorry!” and attempted to use bolt cutters to cut a lock on the front door and escape. Grant, meanwhile, responded by hurling heavy stone tiles at Voyles while he cowered, and then fetched his gun, shooting Voyles three separate times as he fled. Grant would later say in court that he never heard Voyles’ apologies or pleas because he wasn’t wearing his hearing aide at the time, which is perhaps the most perfectly Boomer-esque excuse one could possibly use in 2026 for why you shot someone: “Yeah, I couldn’t hear anything, so naturally I pulled out my gun and started blasting.” Voyles suffered a collapsed lung and shattered bones in one of his arms, requiring multiple surgeries. He testified in court that as Grant approached with the gun, he told him, “You’re going to die, dude.”

That was a rough day for this burglar.
“Owner James Grant threw a cup of urine in Voyles’ face, lobbed heavy tiles toward his body & then momentarily left one area of the building to retrieve a gun…Grant threw the urine that he happened to be carrying in a cup”
www.oregonlive.com/crime/2026/0…

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— Jimmy Malone (@malonespeaking.bsky.social) 8:55 AM · Aug 15, 2026

In the immediate wake of the incident in 2023, Voyles pleaded no contest to charges of first-degree burglary and “menacing,” and was sentenced to five years of probation and mandatory participation in drug treatment programs, although he also apparently served a year in prison during this same period for “an unrelated string of car thefts.” Grant, meanwhile, faced legal scrutiny for the shooting at the time as well, thanks to where it happened: Oregon’s “castle doctrine” allows residents to use lethal force to defend their homes, but that law isn’t supposed to extend to private businesses. Grant was never charged by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office in the shooting, suggesting that prosecutors accepted that the stone and tile business fulfilled the legal definition of a residence … again, despite the city having ordered Grant to stop using it as a residence. The jury in Voyles’ civil trial, meanwhile, seemed to agree with Grant’s reasoning as well.

In the end, the jury also rejected arguments by Voyles’ lawyer that his client was only doing what he felt he needed to do to survive another sub-freezing night while homeless. This is, after all, America: If we need to find a way to justify the firing of a gun, we’ll make it happen.

“We won’t deny that Mr. Voyles did something wrong that night,” said attorney David Wallace. “But that choice did not make his life worthless and it certainly did not make those three bullets necessary.”

Might we suggest that the cup of urine on its own might have ultimately sufficed?