One Person Shot to Death Amid Trump Caravan in Downtown Portland

Witnesses described a hushed scene as police officers gathered around the body of a young man lying in the street.

Police guard the entrance to a downtown Portland parking garage, near where a man was shot to death on Aug. 29, 2020. (Alex Wittwer)
By Aaron Mesh

A man was shot to death in downtown Portland on Saturday night amid a truck caravan that rolled through downtown to mace and taunt citizens in support of President Donald Trump.

Portland police confirmed to WW that they are investigating a homicide outside a parking garage at the corner of Southwest 3rd Avenue and Alder Street.

"At 8:46 pm, Portland police officers heard sounds of gunfire from the area of Southeast 3rd Avenue and Southwest Alder Street," the bureau said in a statement. "They responded and located a victim with a gunshot wound to the chest. Medical responded and determined that the victim was deceased."

Witnesses at the garage, including independent journalist Laura Jedeed, described a hushed scene as police officers gathered around the body of a young man lying in the street. An ambulance arrived, then drove away without the man inside.

That was a stark contrast to minutes before, when a fleet of pickup trucks waving Trump banners rolled through downtown, horns blaring, with red-shirted young men leaning out of windows to yell racial slurs and deploy pepper spray on pedestrians, many of them leftist protesters, who blocked the trucks' path.

Video posted to social media shows two gunshots fired along 3rd Avenue several minutes after the caravan passed through. A photo viewed by WW shows the victim was wearing a hat and T-shirt bearing the emblem of Patriot Prayer, a Vancouver, Wash.-based conservative protest group that has regularly sparred with anti-fascists in Portland streets for the past three years.

Downtown was the final stop on a daylong car caravan to support the president. It started in the early afternoon at Clackamas Town Center mall and drove into Portland, mostly circling the city on interstate highways.

The death appears to be the first killing to result from Portland's political brawls since Jeremy Christian murdered two people aboard a crowded MAX train car on May 26, 2017.

But any motive tonight remains uncertain. It was not immediately clear what political loyalties were held by the people who committed tonight's shooting. A suspect is still at large.

Correction: This post initially cited descriptions of the victim as a young Black man. His ethnicity remains unclear.

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