This story about the mass shooting at a Portland demonstration over the weekend is horrifying. The police statement characterizes this as a confrontation between “armed protesters” and an “armed homeowner” although I haven’t read anything about armed protesters. This is the only thing we’ve heard about the confrontation:
The crime scene “was extremely chaotic,” the police said in a statement on Sunday, “and a number of witnesses were uncooperative with responding officers. Most people on scene left without talking to police.”
The statement added that detectives believe a large number of people either witnessed what happened or recorded the incident. “This is a very complicated incident, and investigators are trying to put this puzzle together without having all the pieces,” the statement said.
One of the victims, Dajah Beck, who turns 39 on Monday and who was contacted through her attorney, said she was shot twice. One bullet went through her side, and the other grazed her knee. Ms. Beck said she was part of a volunteer motorcade group that was working to set up a safety plan and reroute traffic ahead of the march. “We’re not part of the protest,” she said, adding that no one in the motorcade group was armed.
As Ms. Beck and the group were working, with one woman riding in the back of a truck because she walked slower and with the aid of a cane, a man approached a small group of women, screaming that they were “violent terrorists” and repeatedly calling them a misogynist vulgarity. The man said they were the people responsible for violence in the city, Beck recounted, adding that he said: “If I see you come past my house, I’ll shoot you.”
People in the group tried to calm him down. But as Ms. Beck looked away from him toward one of her friends, “that’s when he started shooting,” she said. She fell to the ground after she was shot and crawled behind a truck tire for cover. Moments later, she said, “the first thing that I saw was my two friends on the ground covered in blood.” One of them was the woman who died. Ms. Beck said that at that point, the shooter had been subdued and people were on top of him.
He called them the C-word which indicates he was directly confronting these women,
Maybe this person is lying but it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like this was an armed right winger who opened fire. And it does not sound as if he was “protecting his property” which the “armed homeowner” designation implies.
Maybe there was a protester brandishing a weapons but that doesn’t explain why this guy would start firing at these women. The one he killed was disabled. It’s hard to see how he can claim self-defense. But I’m sure he will …