MAC suicide bomber harassed her in 2022
Heather Howitt can't forget her encounters with Bruce Whitman
In 2022, Heather Howitt was alone at home with the small dog she shared with her ex-husband. It was during COVID, so she was working in her home office when her front doorbell rang.
Howitt is co-founder of Oregon Chai and today is CEO of Thaiwala, a Thai tea beverage.
The man at the door appeared to be an Amazon delivery person. He wore a blue hat and vest.
He was very friendly at first, Howitt recalled; a nice-looking guy. Then he asked her, ‘Oh, hey, are you a member of the MAC?’ When she said she was he became agitated and aggressive.
The dog in her arms became upset as Whitman, the man who drove a rented car loaded with bombs into the Multnomah Athletic Club lobby early Saturday morning, continued to rail at her. She thought that he was going to kill her.
“He was really screaming. I tried to deescalate the situation, to be very chill, and close the door, but it went on for a good five minutes.” Her attempts to calm Whitman were unsuccessful. “You are on the board,” he accused her. “You got me fired.”
“He’s really enraged, and this just goes on for five minutes that seemed like forever.”
Eventually a group of about six male neighbors walked along the sidewalk below.
“Hey, you doing OK up there?” they called up.
Howitt said their appearance is why Whitman eventually returned to his parked car below, a new convertible Mustang. Her neighbors later shared doorbell footage of Whitman arriving on the street and putting on the Amazon disguise.
Howitt states that Whitman returned multiple times after the first incident, parking below her house for weeks.
“Everyone I talked to was directing to me the MAC, as if the MAC was handling the investigation. I didn’t really understand why,” Howitt said. “I did talk to the police once but they said, “Well, you’re not hurt. You’re fine, right?’
The MAC, Howitt said, “told me he was harmless. I asked, ‘does he have guns, tell me he doesn’t have guns.’”
No, he doesn’t have guns, they told her.
She assumes Whitman drove around her neighborhood and saw MAC stickers on her car, parked on Northwest Thurman Street.
She now keeps bear spray by her front door and has a new full-time dog. Her roommate is still queasy about being in the home alone.
The Oregonian's coverage of the Multnomah Athletic Club bombing [1] reveals an editorial failure that accidentally confirms the broader critique running through both Portland Dissent [2] and the Northwest Examiner [3].
The piece reads as though Bruce Whitman were a victim rather than a perpetrator. His mother's grief leads the story. His half-brother's "he was a good guy, I thought" closes it. The language throughout is consistently gentle — Whitman "was facing mental health challenges," he "developed a violent obsession," he "was let go" from his job. This is the structure of a sympathetic obituary, not an accountability story about a man who spent four years terrorizing specific people before driving a rental car loaded with pipe bombs and propane into a building at three in the morning.
The most glaring problem is an absence. Heather Howett — the MAC member who feared for her life when Whitman showed up at her door disguised as an Amazon delivery driver, screamed at her for five minutes, and returned to park outside her home for weeks — does not appear in the Oregonian's piece at all. A small community paper found her and published her account the same day. The Oregonian, with vastly greater resources, apparently never called her. The cop who told Howett "you're not hurt, you're fine, right?" and the Oregonian reporter who never sought her out are working from the same assumption about whose experience matters.
This goes beyond fairness to victims. As both Portland Dissent and the Northwest Examiner make clear, the Oregonian's framing mirrors the institutional posture that allowed Whitman to remain a free and escalating threat for years. Norm Frink, a former Chief Deputy District Attorney, contacted DA Mike Schmidt's office directly seeking more aggressive intervention. The result, in Frink's words, was "some things around the edges." The system, he says, "is run by mental health advocates who don't believe in incarcerating the mentally ill, even if there is significant evidence they are dangerous."
The two red flag orders — under which Whitman surrendered guns in 2022 and again in February — are presented by the Oregonian as evidence the system did its job. Frink's account suggests the opposite: that the red flag orders were the minimum the system was willing to do, and that more aggressive action was available and refused. The Oregonian had the facts to pursue that question and chose not to.
Portland Dissent asks the question the Oregonian should have led with: how many other Whitmans are out there, and what is Portland going to do about them besides issue condolences? That question cannot be answered by coverage that treats the bomber's mother as the primary moral authority on what happened. It requires journalism willing to hold accountable the institutions — the DA's office, the police, the mental health system, and the press itself — whose shared assumptions made this outcome more likely than it needed to be.
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**Sources:**
1. Austin De Dios, "'I didn't see': Mother of MAC bombing suspect said his mental health seemed improved before attack," The Oregonian/OregonLive, May 3, 2026.
2. Pamela Fitzsimmons, "The Age of Disgruntlement," Portland Dissent, May 4, 2026.
3. Allan Classen, "MAC suicide bomber harassed her in 2022," Northwest Examiner, May 4, 2026.
It’s appalling that the police didnt look into this, how was that not illegal? Doesn’t surprise me at all in Portland, however.