After the Portland Train Stabbing, Scenes of Grief and Grievance

The Hollywood Transit Center, in Portland, Oregon, was quiet on Sunday morning, but its concrete walkways were filled with words of love and grief. By twos and by threes, by bike and by foot, people arrived to leave flowers or messages of remembrance for Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best, the two Portland men who, on May 26th, were fatally stabbed on the light-rail train, after they tried to stop a man from shouting anti-Muslim insults at two teen-age girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. (Another man, Micah Fletcher, who also intervened, was badly wounded but survived.) At the Transit Center, a small, dark-haired girl drew a heart on the sidewalk with thick orange chalk, carefully underlining it three times, as if for emphasis. On one of the walkway walls, in bold pink letters, someone had recorded Namkai-Meche’s reported parting words, uttered as medics carried him away on a stretcher: “Tell everyone on this train I love them.”

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