A gunman killed and injured protesters at a BLM march. Why did police blame the victims?
Two years after an attackershot five volunteers before aBlack Lives Matter march in Portland, Oregon,killing a 60year-old woman and leaving one of her young friends paralyzed,a new visual investigation of the attack revealsthat the assailant tried to provoke a standyour-ground situation, daring three women to fight him, before suddenly opening fire when they refused.
The research agency Forensic Architecture collaborated with survivors on a reconstruction of the attack, analyzing helmet-camera video recorded by one of the victims, police radio traffic obtained through public records requests, and the testimony of 11 witnesses – including the volunteer armed guard who stopped the rampage by shooting and disarming the gunman.
The accumulated evidence flatly contradicts what Portland’s police chief told the public and city council staff in the days after the attack: that the gunman, 43-year-old Ben Smith, had opened fire only after he had been confronted by “armed protesters”.
That false characterization of the unarmed victims as aggressors, which was repeated in dozens of local and national news reports, remains uncorrected on the website of the Portland police bureau (PPB) even today, as the survivors mark the second anniversary of Smith murdering their friend, June Knightly.
The attack took place on 19 February
2022 before a march in northeast Portland to demand justice for two young Black men killed by police officers in Minneapolis, Daunte Wright and Amir Locke.
The shooting victims were part of a community of antifascist volunteers that formed spontaneously in 2020 to keep the racial justice protesters who filled Portland’s streets day after day safe by redirecting traffic away from marchers, a role known as “corking”, providing them with emergency medical aid and using principles of deescalation to talk down aggrieved bystanders.
The new evidence reveals that Smith first approached the volunteers about 30 minutes before the shootingas they were discussing the march route.
He asked one of them, a woman who uses the nickname Deg while corking, what the protest was about and how long they planned to be there.
When Smith returnedabout half an hour later, the volunteers said, hecalled the corkers “terrorists”, screaming a misogynistic slur and ordering them to leave. One of the women, who goes by Hank while corking, recalled Smith saying: “If I ever see you again, I’m going to shoot you in the head.”
Footage from a helmet camera worn by another volunteer, Dajah Beck, shows that Smith appeared intent on drawing the women into a physical confrontation, daring them to “make” him leave. Beck shared her footage with police following the attack, but did not make it public until now because the raw video is graphic and distressing. “It was very obvious that he was trying to engineer a ‘stand-your-ground’ situation,” Beck said.
When one of the corkers, Allie Bradley, refused to take the bait, Smith charged at her as if to hit her, shouting: “Do something!”the footage shows. Raising her arms to protect herself, Bradley told Smith: “I don’t want to fight with you. Just go home. Go home
and have a good night.”
A male medic who had heard the shouting arrived and tried to reason with Smith. “No laws are being broken here, friend,” the medic said. “Why don’t you just go home?”
As Smith spun around, shouting: “Fuck you!” Knightly, who was tall but walked with a cane and had lost her long hair to a round of chemotherapy, stepped between him and Deg and demanded that he leave. “Push me! Do something!” Smithcan be heard shouting. When Knightly spoke to him more quietly, Smith repeated: “Make me! Make me go!”
Moments later, Smith pulled out a concealed semi-automatic pistol, clicked off the safety and shot Knightly in the mouth and Deg in the neck. He then fired at the medic, who was already diving for cover, shooting him through the hand and the side of his head. He then shot Bradley twice at close range and turned back to shoot Beck, the bullet penetrating the side of her chest.
As Beck took cover in front of Knightly’s truck, Smith shot Bradley again, but, before he could reload – he told the police later he had up to 42 more rounds in his pockets – a volunteer armed guard for the protest who sprinted to the scene when the attack started shotSmith in the hip with an AR-15 from about 20 yards away. The guard, who can be seen briefly in Beck’s video after the shooting, then disarmed Smith and dressed the wounds of two of the gunshot victims. As a protest medic cut off Smith’s clothing to give him emergency medical care, keeping the attacker alive, the guard noticedthat underneath he was wearing a Tshirt with the phrase: “Kyle Rittenhouse is a true patriot.”
It would later emerge that Smith had railed against antifascists in rightwing Telegram chats and that he had posted a comment on the YouTube channel of the anti-antifascist blogger Andy Ngo a month before the attack. It read: “This is why you arm yourselves folks.”
As Beck tried to assess Knightly’s wounds, she set her helmet on the ground, where it continued to record as protest medics and corkers tried to keep their friends alive until paramedics could get there.
The camera captures Beck’s anger and dismay when the police arrived and said they first had to “secure the scene” before ambulances waiting outside the park would be allowed in. “Will you fucking help us!” shecan be heard shouting at the officers. “People are dying!”
The first ambulance arrived on scene four minutes later, and took Deg to a hospital for emergency surgery on the gunshot wound to her neck; she was left quadriplegic.
A minute later, as Beck sat behind Deg’s car to receive medical aid and talk to a police officer, Hank brought her helmet to her. The camera captures the officer asking Beck: “You don’t have any weapons, right?”
“No,” Beck responds. “No. Nobody had any weapons. He came up to us and started a fight. And June got out of her car to tell him to leave. She’s 60. She told him to leave and he fucking shot her.”
Seconds later, the video records Beck’s anguished attempt to make sense of what Smith had done to them. “We’re fucking traffic corkers. Why are you shooting at us? All we do is keep people safe,” she said, sobbing. “All we do is protect people. Why would you shoot us?”
Covered in blood from treating their injured friends, the guard who shot Smith turned themself in to police. “I walk up straight to them, as calmly as I possibly can,” they recalled. “And I say that I was involved and I want to speak to a lawyer.”
The guard was eventually arrested and charged later that night with two felonies for shooting Smith. Then, abruptly and without explanation, they were informed a few hours later that new evidence had come to light and the charges had been dropped. When the guard was released, they said, detectives refused to give them back their clothes – claiming that it was “in evidence” – or to provide any alternative clothing. They walked out of the justice center in just their underwear.
A Portland deputy district attorney, Nathan Vasquez, confirmed last year that the evidence that cleared the guard was the helmet camera video, which Vasquez and police detectives obtained and watched within hours of the attack.
“Once viewing the video, I consulted with the detectives and we agreed and were very clear: this was a justified shooting,” Vasquez said. “I am of the belief that had [the guard] not acted, there would’ve been potentially much more loss of life, and I believe that their actions saved other people.”
It remains unclear why three hours after the guard was released, the Portland police bureau published a statement on its website stating thata preliminary investigation into Knightly’s murder “indicates this incident started with a confrontation between an armed homeowner and armed protesters”.
Two days later, that false claim was repeated by the most senior officer on the force. In a virtual news conference on 22 February, Portland police chief Chuck Lovell said that the police had “determined that it was a confrontation between an armed resident and armed protesters”.
The department would stick to that narrative for several days after the attack, even as prosecutors secured a warrant for Smith’s arrest and prepared to charge him.
Smith himself told detectives he was never confronted by armed protesters.
In hisfirst interview with the police, on 8 March, as he recovered from his injuries in a hospital,Smithtolddetectives that he had seen two of the volunteer guards for the protest armed with AR platform weapons in the park before the march– and had called 911 to complain about it at 7.42pm. But when he confronted the unarmed corkers 15 minutes later in another location, he said, according to an audio recording of the interview, “nobody pointed a weapon at me. This is all me. I lost it.
I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t understand what went wrong with me.”
Smith pleaded guilty in March 2023 to Knightly’s murder and the attempted murder of four other people. He was sentenced to life in prison.
A PPB press officer, Sgt Kevin Allen, refused to make Lovell or the detectives involved in the case available for an interview.
Police updated their statement in March 2022, Allen said, after Smith’s interview.But they never corrected the claim that “armed protesters” had confronted Smith before he opened fire.
Two years following the attack, survivors remain convinced that antipathy toward the protest movement led the police to cast the victims as suspects in initial public statements. Police dispatch records obtained through a public records request show that officers responding to the shooting were advised that “this is an anti-police protest”.
“They don’t like us. And I am certain that that influenced the way that statement went the following day, and they’ve never done anything to retract it, never came out and said: ‘What we said was wrong,’” said Bradley.
The film The Murder of June Knightly, made by Robert Mackey and Forensic Architecture, will be exhibited in Portland, as part of thePolicing Justiceshow at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, whichruns 23 February to 19 May 2024.
united.”
The two families were close: Alexei and Yulia attended the Gudkovs’ wedding. Gudkov called Navalny’s death “not only a political tragedy, but also a personal one.”
“When you are part of the Navalny family, you have to prepare for everything,” he said. “Of course, she is strong.”
She was by his side as the two flew back to an almost certain fate in 2021. As they approached passport control at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the couple were met by a phalanx of police officers, who said he was under arrest.
Alexei turned back to Yulia with a pained look, and gave her a kiss. The pair shared a quick goodbye, and she turned her eyes to the ground. Neither cried.
On Monday, Navalnaya vowed to expose the people who had killed her husband and to carry on his legacy. “A different person should be sitting in front of you but Vladimir Putin killed him,” she said, her voice filled with anger.
And as she began her new political life, she reprised her husband’s catchphrase (“Hello, this is Navalny!”) in a homage that his supporters would recognise immediately.
Staring directly into the camera, she began: “Hello, this is Yulia Navalnaya.”