Thread by @NancyRomm

It's Election Night 2020 and we have no idea how calm or not calm it will be in Portland and other cities across the country.

There has only been one killing directly related to the protests in Portland, a killing the news cycle carried off quickly, for reasons talked and not talked about.

Some thoughts on, An Inconvenient Murder

Chandler Pappas was walking in downtown Portland on August 29th when he heard gunshots.

“The first reaction you have is like, ‘Did that really just happen?’” he says. “There was no altercation. We didn’t see anybody.

There was no reason for this to happen.”

The “we” refers to Pappas and his friend Aaron Danielson. Video captured at around 8:45pm shows Danielson, known to his friends as Jay, taking several steps before crumpling to the street. It captures the shooter running away.

We will get to him later. For now I want to stay with Danielson, who was five days shy of his 40th birthday when the bullet entered his chest, and with Pappas, who two months later sits at a dining table in Southeast Portland and tells me the story.

“It’s surreal that gunshots just rang out,” he says. “Within a second, your thought is, ‘Okay, did that just happen? I’m not shot. Where is my friend?’ Well, he’s dead. He’s on the ground.”

Pappas is 27.

He wears a large gold crucifix and keeps his dark hair shorn nearly to the scalp, which you see when he fiddles with his ballcap, which reads, “Justice for Jay.” He is not today, as Danielson was the night he was killed, wearing his Patriot Prayer cap.

The is cap is important here, as it, or what was written on it, was mentioned in nearly all news coverage of the event, to let readers know, it seemed to me, whose murder they were being asked to invest in and, by the insignia, maybe not invest in.

To that point, did you know the name Aaron Danielson before I mentioned it?

If there “was no reason for” the murder, our reaction to it was reasonable, or reasonable insofar as we’d spent the season tunneling to a place where such an event could be met with a cool head, would be, if not excused, then not something to be concerned about, considering.

Movements have a glow.

How the glow is perceived depends on where you stand and what you desire: a sense of belonging, a place to be useful, a cause in which to prove you are not the ne’er-do-well brother, the troubled father; with this movement, maybe, you can go from zero to hero.

“Every Revolution needs people that are willing and ready to fight,” Michael Reinoehl wrote in June, around the time he had a black power fist tattooed on his neck. “I am 100% ANTIFA all the way! I am willing to fight for my brothers and sisters.”

It is unknown whether Reinoehl considered shooting Danielson taking it “all the way.” Others not willing to take it quite that far nevertheless appreciated the effort.

Within hours, a group of BLM and antifa supporters openly celebrated the murder, cheering after a woman shouted into a bullhorn, “We can take out the trash on our own… I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight!”

Whether those applauding would later feel proud of their display, whether they would chalk it up to “heat of the moment” or “youthful exuberance” or “ends justify the means” is also unknown. What is known is that BLM and antifa did not rush to embrace Reinoehl.

Perhaps they trusted they had the leverage to let the story slide, that the right people would be on their side.

The day after the murder, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown made a statement that implied Danielson was responsible for his own death.

“The right-wing group Patriot Prayer and self-proclaimed militia members drove into downtown Portland last night, armed and looking for a fight,” said Brown. “I will not allow Patriot Prayer and armed white supremacists to bring more bloodshed to our streets.”

Patriot Prayer was not self-proclaimed militia but never mind; the statement matched the popular thinking in Portland, which, entering its fourth month of nightly protests, was not in the mood to equivocate, was strung too tight to extend sympathy or humanity to some dude who…

…earlier in the day had ridden in a caravan of pick-up trucks flying Trump flags and firing paintball guns at protesters. People like Danielson were unwanted in Portland, and did their presence sparking the city’s first protest-related murder not prove that?

That Reinoehl – 48, underemployed, with a string of arrests, including for illegal possession of a gun – might make an inconvenient hero would not prove to be an issue, when 4 days after killing Danielson, he himself was killed by law enforcement sent to arrest him for murder.

Immediately after registering that he had not been shot, Pappas saw Danielson on the ground. He grabbed his friend’s shoulders and turned him face up.

“I asked him if he’s okay. I called his name,” he says. “Within seconds, actually, there were Antifa medics on top of us. And so I ended up pushing them off.”

A man is down and people rush to help: What do you do?

If you were Pappas, pushing them off was an autonomic response. This is because in one sense, Kate Brown was right: groups like Patriot Prayer do come to Portland armed and looking for a fight, if insofar not a gun fight...

...for the past few years it’s been bluster and LARPing, boo-yah boys in camo and black bloc kids shouting in each other faces. Sometimes they mace each other; sometimes there’s an altercation, but nothing like what happened August 29.

If I imagined Danielson’s killing would stun and sadden the adversaries, that they might mourn together like Montagues and Capulets, this is not what happened, and it is not what happened because the person we presumed would be the villain was the victim and vice versa.

Pappas did not want antifa touching his friend, whose eyes were open. “So I pushed the Antifa medic off. And I keep looking for his wound. I looked for something that I can plug, that I can stop,” he says.

“And I realized, he’s non-responsive, but I’m just looking for some kind of answer somewhere.”

And then the police were there, and detectives, some of whom were nice, including the one who held Pappas’s hand as he wept, some less nice, asking questions like, “Why the hell were you down here?”

And then is was 12:45 and Pappas was free to go home.

“I live by myself,” he says. “I have a dog.”

What was he doing down there? How did a day that began with laughing in the back of a pick-up devolve into murder?

If we stick with the common script, with the story most people feel comfortable with, the answer is obvious: After he was killed, Danielson was found to have a gun in his pocket.

“His Glock, I think,” says Pappas, who did not know his friend had been carrying, who himself had not been carrying, Pappas never brought firearms to these confrontations, which until then had been for them something of a lark.

“We decided we wanted to see what was going on at the Justice,” Pappas explains, as to why he and Danielson returned to Portland after the truck rally.

“Sometimes it’s really funny, frankly, to watch these little 90-pound antifas attack 250-pound police officers and just kind of get thrown around. So, I mean, we thought we’d go investigate and see what was going on.”

They were there for the action, in other words.

So was Reinoehl. The argument that he, more than Danielson, was downtown looking for trouble is not one that can be decided. Each man carried a gun. Each wore their allegiance in plain sight -- that neck tattoo, that ballcap.

One difference, maybe, is that for Reinoehl, a ballcap was provocation enough to kill a man he had never met, enough for people to cheer his death instead of chanting his name.