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Larry Blackwood, 27, was on the westbound MAX yesterday, riding at least one car behind the one where the two men were killed after defending two young women from racist abuse, when the train stopped at Hollywood Transit Center.
"The doors opened up and people started jumping off the MAX," Blackwood recalls. "I heard people screaming. I heard a woman scream, 'He's stabbing people.' I jumped up and said 'Then fucking stop him!'"
On the platform, Blackwood saw two men laying on the ground, "holding their necks, bleeding out of their necks, like thick black blood… I could smell the blood, there was so much of it," he says.
Then he gave chase.
Blackwood ran up the stairs from the platform, overheard another witness describing the suspect—long hair, no shirt, running to the right—and, with two other men from the train, gave chase.
They encountered him after crossing 47th Street on an access road under I-84.
"He stopped there, turned around and pulled his knife out. He said, 'You want some?' I said, 'No man.' Luckily he believed me."
Blackwood and the two other men continued following the suspect, now identified by police as Jeremy Joseph Christian, a known white supremacist with a long criminal record and a recent history of public displays of racism. "When we crossed over 47th, a police officer was driving by," Blackwood says. "We said, 'Yo this guy is the guy!' He immediately jumped out with his AR-15."
Soon the area was swarming with police. They surrounded Christian, who had donned a shirt and was attempting to wash the blood from his body. Christian, Blackwood says, began shouting at police: "Shoot me! Go ahead and shoot me in the back, you piece of shit!" He held a knife in his right hand and some type of container—water or beer, Blackwood speculated—in his left hand.
Blackwood took a cell phone video of Christian's arrest.
In the video, Christian can be seen slowly in front of the officers, taking a few swigs from his beverage container, while yelling at them.
Blackwood was not able to film Christian's actual arrest because he was shooed away by police. They did not ask him for a witness statement.
Blackwood, a cook with Portland City Grill, then walked home, rattled. "I've never seen people bleeding to death in front of me," he told WW. "That was pretty intense."
"Every fucking week somebody's getting stabbed or shot," he said. "What the hell's going on around here man?"