After a night of peace, a riot broke out in Portland overnight, extending the chain of nearly unabated unrest since late May.
A march that started at Laurelhurst Park ended up at the Penumbra Kelly building, which houses a Multonomah County Sheriff’s Office and a Portland Police office. The group blocked traffic, forcing firefighters responding to a nearby house fire to reroute.
Some rioters began late Monday to throw objects at officers and flash strobe lights, bright flashlights, and laser pointers in their eyes. When members of the crowd entered Kelly building property, officers made one arrest. The man was later identified as Zachary Perry, 23, of Portland. While they were making the arrest, police had numerous items thrown at them, according to the Portland Police Bureau’s incident summary.
Because of criminal activity, officers declared the gathering an unlawful assembly.
Officers moved the crowd to the east but faced violence. One officer was punched while another was injured when a rioter swung a baton at them. One more arrest was made during the mayhem. Travis Hessel, 27, was charged with assaulting an officer.
After moving the crowd several blocks away, officers disengaged following the deployment of inert smoke.
Some of the rioters returned to the Kelly building and continued shouting at officers and flashing lights at them until about 1:30 a.m. when they left the area.
During the night’s events, the crowd shouted, “Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground.”
Several miles west of the Kelly building, on Monday a woman was stabbed after getting in an argument with people in Lownsdale Square park. The victim was rushed to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
People have been gathering at the park on a nightly basis. It sits across the street from the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, a federal building rioters assaulted nightly before beginning to leave it alone over the weekend.
“During the initial response, officers encountered a hostile crowd and additional police resources were summoned to try to conduct an investigation. Officers initially located the knife used in the stabbing, however as the officers were trying to secure a crime scene someone picked it up and ran off with it. Officers were unable to safely conduct an investigation due to the hostile crowd, and supervisors made the decision to disengage,” police said in an incident summary.
Whoever has the knife should turn it over to the police, the bureau said.
No arrest has yet been made. The woman who was stabbed said on social media that she declined to press charges. The self-described member of Antifa, a far-left, anarcho-communist network, wrote, “I did not request, nor utilize their ’services,'” adding later, “[Expletive] the police.”
While state police disengaged following the arrest, the unruly crowd hurled projectiles at them. A glass object struck a trooper in the head and shattered. State police deployed munitions to defend themselves as they retreated.
The juvenile was released to a parent’s custody after investigators determined the gun, though it looked real, was a pellet gun. The case was referred to a prosecutor.
