Keith Baker found the body of Phillip Brooks, but he's still searching for answers

Keith Baker, 73, is a Vietnam Veteran and was a highly experienced search and rescue team member with the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Baker did two tours in Vietnam, where he was trained to be a sniper and a tunnel rat.

Whether in the jungles of Southeast Asia or in the pine and juniper trees of Central Oregon, Baker could see a story unfold when tracking people or animals in remote areas.

From a young age, Baker would follow his father into the woods and learn how to track game animals and people.

After returning from Vietnam, Baker moved to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation with his wife and volunteered with an elite group of search and rescue team members. Later, in the early 1990s, Baker became friendly with Otho Caldera, the Sheriff of Wheeler County. Baker and Caldera met at a 4-H event and Caldera thought it would be fun to teach kids in Wheeler County how to look for lost people or to track wild game.

On September 20, 1994, when Phillip Brooks went missing, Sheriff Otho Caldera grew concerned when his deputies and local volunteers failed to find him after a full day of searching. Sheriff Caldera called the Warm Springs Search and Rescue Team to assist. That night, the team arrived at the sprawling Foppiano Ranch and, at first light, set out to begin tracking.

When replaying the events that unfolded in late September of 1994, Baker says that some things went well and others didn't. There are many theories about how Brooks was killed, and whether or not it was an accident.

For Baker, the tracks told the story.

Phillip Brooks was riding his sister's horse, Flirt, on September 20, 1994. It was his day off and he often would take rides on the property.

Within an hour, Baker and the Warm Springs Search and Rescue Team had identified the tracks of Flirt. However, the first search parties that had looked for Brooks left dozens of horse and tire tracks throughout the property. Now, nearly 48 hours later, Baker and others worked to eliminate other sets of tracks and to stick with the unique horseshoes that Flirt was wearing.

Baker describes coming across several stands used for elk hunting, which Brooks passed on that warm day, the final day of summer in 1994. Trees were notched from where rifles had been leaned against trees or stumps.

Then, following Flirt's tracks that turned and went up a hill, Baker saw a body on the ground. It was Phillip Brooks, the 23-year-old cowboy who was a graduate of Mitchell High School. He was not moving. Baker checked for a pulse but the body was cold. He immediately called his supervisor, Stony Miller, who radioed Sheriff Caldera. While he waited, Baker continued to look around the area and found that Brooks had circled around the knoll, likely looking for something.

When Sheriff Caldera arrived, he opened Brook's shirt and they saw a bullet hole in his chest.

"Sheriff Caldera said that we probably have a homicide," Baker recalls. After they worked to protect the crime scene, Baker asked Sheriff Caldera if he and another tracker could continue to work the scene.

"We had an opportunity to see where the shooter had been at, and maybe even where they went," Baker says.

Soon, Baker and his partner had found a stump, just 100 yards away from where the body had been found. There were cigarette butts on the ground, Baker says, and evidence that someone had recently been there, likely waiting for elk to pass through.

Recreating the scene, Baker saw that Brooks would have been just above a tree line when he was on the horse and would not have been visible to the shooter. But when Brooks got off to take a chew of Copenhagen and knelt down on the ground, a gunshot rang out, which pierced his heart. He fell over backward with his cowboy hat still on his head.

Baker believes that the horse ran directly towards the shooter, who it could not see. The shooter, he believes, then scrambled down the hill, falling and "in a panic," Baker says.

In fact, Baker believes that the shooter was in such a panic, that they had to urinate, something that Baker says is common when people are in high stress situations.

"I saw a rock that had urine on it, just below from where the shot was taken and the person had panicked, in a scramble to get away."

Baker says that the shooter did not approach the body of Phillip Brooks and in fact, they avoided going out into the tree opening, and instead "slunk through the brush and trees," as not to be seen.

Baker says the footprints were small and he believes that they either belonged to a woman or a teenage boy. Baker explains that women and teenage boys have a similar gate, until boys mature and their stride changes, when they turn sixteen or seventeen.

Feeling that he was close to having a fairly good idea what had happened, Baker was wanting to push on to see where the tracks had led, believing that more details about the shooter could be found.

But as he stumbled upon some tire tracks, Oregon State Police Troopers had arrived and told everyone to stand down.

"They were all in suits and didn't have the right shoes for being out there," Baker says. Soon, OSP had the trackers looking in other areas that had nothing to do with the crime scene, Baker explains.

"We knew there were some bow hunters up there, hunting illegally, but who had nothing to do with (the shooting)," Baker says.

Baker returned home but was summoned to return and to help guide OSP through the route that Phillip Brooks had taken that day. He carefully approached the area where he believed the shooter had been staging, and where Baker believes the fatal shot had been fired from.

"When I told them that, they jumped into the area, believing that they might find a piece of brass," – a shell casing that would identify the weapon used. "But they were so gung-ho that they trampled the crime scene, there might have been more there but after that it was useless," Baker says.

Baker says that he saw OSP detectives bag cigarette butts as evidence, which could be used to do a DNA search. But that evidence appears to have been lost or nobody followed up on it.

OSP did have lasers that they used to decipher where the shot had come from, and Baker says that while others think the shot came from over 400 yards away and by accident , he believes it was a close and intentional act.

But as the case went cold and then into the deep freeze as the years rolled by, hope for bringing the killer to justice slowly eroded.

Seventeen years later, after author Rick Steber wrote "Caught in the Crosshairs," the 2011 detailed account of the shooting and its aftermath, the Oregon Attorney General reassigned the case to new detectives. "There was some hope," says Baker, who accompanied the detectives with Steber to the Foppiano Ranch. "They seemed really interested, asking good questions and wanting clarification."

But just weeks later, one of the detectives retired from law enforcement, leaving both Baker and Steber to believe that the case still wasn't being taken seriously.

Currently, the Wheeler County District Attorney, the Oregon State Police, and the Oregon Department of Justice still consider the killing of Phillip Brooks to be an open case, but not actively being investigated.

These days, Baker and Steber continue to talk regularly. They also meet with former Wheeler Co. Sheriff Dave Rouse. But many people who were involved in the case in 1994 are no longer alive. This goes for Phillip Brooks's family members-his father, Jim Brooks, and mother, Joyce, have passed away.

"I would have loved to get closure for them, my heart really goes out to Jim (Brooks) – they deserved better than that," Baker says.