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Seamy suit boils bay

Bitter court case splits neighbors

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, May 22, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (32 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Neighbors in the gated Hayden Bay community settled a defamation suit last month involving a broad range of allegations including stalking, financial intrigue, burglary and arson.

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You’ve surely heard stories of bad breakups and of bitter neighbor-to-neighbor disputes — heck, maybe you’ve even lived through one.

But you haven’t heard a story like what’s been happening behind the private gate of Hayden Bay, an affluent community on Hayden Island, near North Portland’s Jantzen Beach.

The records from a lawsuit that settled last month in Multnomah County Circuit Court read like the plot of a TV drama, say “Boston Legal” or “Law and Order.”

The storyline’s ingredients range from a murder mystery to a woman who threatens to sue her neighbor for letting dogs run near her property.

Other allegations run the gamut: bigamy, stalking, financial skulduggery and international intrigue — as well as burglary and the burning of three yachts at the nearby Columbia River Yacht Club.

“Pretty crazy, huh?” said Patty Schweiger, 61, who otherwise declined to discuss the three years of just-concluded litigation with her son’s ex-girlfriend. “I’m still in shell shock.”

Pooneh Entezari, 40, the son’s ex-girlfriend and Schweiger’s neighbor, declined to discuss the case.

The lawsuit shows what happens when two intelligent, strong-willed and affluent people are each willing to spend an estimated tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses battling the other.

That sum does not include any monetary proceeds from the confidential settlement of the defamation lawsuit that Entezari had pursued against Schweiger since 2005.

“It was certainly an unusual case,” said Multnomah County Circuit Judge Michael Marcus, a 17-year veteran of the bench who presided over the trial last month.

Neighbors become friends

More than a decade ago, inside the bright blue gate of the Hayden Bay community, Schweiger introduced herself to her neighbor, Entezari, suggesting she meet her son, Chris, who was about her age.

It was an unusually social move for Hayden Bay, the type of place where people tend to keep to themselves. Gerald Reitmeier, the neighborhood association’s security chairman, says theirs is not like other neighborhoods, where people socialize at barbecues and in one another’s homes.

“People here are older, and some of them are quite successful,” he said. “That home is their castle, and they don’t want to share that with other people.”

The two began dating in 1993, and Chris Schweiger eventually moved in with Entezari, four doors away from his parents’ home. They had a daughter, now 10.

The holder of a master’s degree in clinical psychology, Entezari was more affluent than the average 28-year-old, having taken over her father’s business holdings at an early age.

According to public records, she owns dozens of rentals and other properties, along with several homes for people with disabilities, including Premier Living Center Inc. and Harmony Living Inc.

The Schweigers, meanwhile, owned an indoor air quality company, Environmental Control Corp., as well as several other businesses, including the Sunshine Pizza Exchange. They keep their 43-foot Bayliner at the nearby Columbia River Yacht Club.

“They’re the salt of the earth” said Connie Hunt of Schweiger and her husband, Dick. The head of the homeowners association, Hunt added that Schweiger is a compassionate, can-do person who does not hesitate to help others. “She is a remarkable person.”

Schweiger and Entezari soon found common cause: what Entezari, in court filings, describes as her obsession with clearing the name of her father, who was convicted of killing her mother in 1989 and imprisoned despite his continuing claim of innocence.

It was the kind of thing that Patty Schweiger, with her knowledge of law enforcement, could help with. She was the co-founder and former head of Trauma Intervention Programs Inc., a nonprofit that works with the Portland Fire Bureau and police to help people who have been exposed to traumatic situations.

She also served as the de facto protector of the east end of the single-street gated community. She surrounded her house, valued at $3 million, with motion detectors and surveillance cameras to track potential intruders on a path near the house and the nearby Columbia River Yacht Club.

For Entezari, Schweiger helped find a lawyer and private investigator, and even took some of Entezari’s information to the FBI. She went so far as to rent an apartment to the man Entezari suspected of being the real murderer, according to court records. Nothing ever came of it, and subsequent events caused Schweiger to come to another conclusion.

Relationship turns ugly

In 2003, Entezari and Chris Schweiger split up and began an ugly custody dispute. According to court records, Chris later would claim that Entezari threatened his life, saying such things as “You won’t live through this crap,” and “If you don’t die, I will take everything you own. … You will go to jail.”

According to Entezari's lawyer, Sheila Potter, Entezari denies ever making these comments.

Trying to help her son claim a domestic partnership and a share of his ex-girlfriend’s wealth, Patty Schweiger pored through boxes of documents belonging to Entezari, documents Schweiger would later claim were left in the couple’s shared storage.

While she initially had believed Entezari’s description of her father’s innocence, Schweiger later testified that the documents were “unsettling,” saying “The documents were not agreeing with what I was told.”

Thanks to Schweiger’s son’s claim to have been threatened by Entezari as well as the impending release of Entezari’s father, a murder that was already 14 years in the past suddenly became a concern for Schweiger. She started to suspect that Entezari and her father were a threat, court documents show.

Pooneh Entezari’s trial lawyer, Renee Rothauge, had a different view of events. She said that, while her client could not comment, in Rothauge’s opinion, “Ms. Schweiger set out to destroy my client, and I believe she would have gotten away with it if Ms. Entezari did not go to the justice system.”

In her lawsuit, Entezari claimed that the documents in question were stolen from her garage and office.

Divorce ends with death

The murder that so concerned Schweiger happened May 1, 1989, at a time when depositions were about to begin for a bitter divorce between Pooneh Entezari’s parents.

That morning, following a noise neighbors described like a car backfiring, Effie Entezari’s body was found in a parking lot outside her Vancouver, Wash., apartment. She’d been shot in the head at close range.

According to Clark County Sheriff’s Office records, many of her friends and relatives told police she’d feared her life was in danger from her husband, Mohammed “Mike” Entezari-Afshar.

According to one police report, the couple, originally from Iran, fought over many things including politics — since Mike was a supporter of the fundamentalist leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. During the divorce, Effie Entezari wanted half of Mike’s assets, and he had no interest in giving it to her.

According to sheriff’s records, several friends related a story she’d told them that her daughter, Pooneh, had warned her one week before the murder that if she won in her divorce case, she could be harmed. Pooneh Entezari had been aligned with her father, acquaintances of the family told police.

Entezari at the time denied that there was a threat, and said she actually was worried not about what her father might do, but about her mother’s friends. She later would say she believed her father was innocent.

Entezari’s father’s divorce lawyer, Karin DeDona, agreed, noting the evidence against him was largely circumstantial. “I never thought he was guilty,” she told the Portland Tribune.

But police pointed to the fact that Entezari-Afshar was found with a .38-caliber pistol and five bullets — one of which was a hollow-point round. Two ballistics experts said that was the caliber of the murder weapon.

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