The family of killed Trump supporter Aaron “Jay” Danielson submitted a federal claim against the City of Portland, its mayor, and the county district lawyer on Friday. The claim specifies that Danielson’s death was “avoidable” and blames the city and authorities for a “hands-off technique” to its policing technique.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court on Friday, states the City of Portland stood a “hands-off method” to political presentations and counter-protests in the city and this cultivated a “culture of vigilante policing,” OregonLive.com reported.
Throughout a pro-Trump rally that engaged a counter-protest from regional Antifa activists, Michael Forest Reinoehl shot and killed Danielson. Reinoehl was seen in security videos lurking in an alcove prior to emerging to fire the deadly shot, Breitbart News reported.
Security video footage from the parking lot nearby to the scene of the crime last weekend showed Reinhoel “emerging from an alcove of a parking garage before shooting 2 gunshots, one that struck the man’s bear spray can and the other that showed deadly,” according to the Oregonian, which reviewed an affidavit filed by police that was unsealed after [Reinoehl’s] death.
Lawyer for Danielson’s estate, Christopher L. Cauble, said “We are seeking justice for the preventable death of a young man, gunned down in a city with a harmful and fatal hands-off approach to public safety,” in a written statement published by OregonLive. “Time and time once again, City leadership and police have actually stopped working to find a reliable reaction to clashing groups of protesters.”
The complainant looks for a total of $13 million in damages. Those damages include $1.5 million in economic damage, $1.5 million in non-economic damages, and up to $10 million in compensatory damages.
Named as offenders in the suit are the City of Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler, and Multnomah County District Lawyer Mike Schmidt.
Schmidt is implicated in the claim for his role in adopting a brand-new policy to not pursue what he considered “public order crimes such as criminal mischief, interfering with an officer or a stand-alone riot charge, and rather would focus on intentional home damage and threats of force or actual force against others.”
Soon prior to the filing of the lawsuit, Mayor Wheeler confessed the “hands-off techniques” for dealing with rioters was “not the ideal technique,” Fox News reported.
“It is clear, based on the general public outcry, on the mediaprotest, on the national front, that strategy was not the ideal method,” the mayor said during a city board conference last week, according to the Associated Press. “I believe we can all acknowledge that. I take complete obligation for it.”
The lawsuit alleges that the authorities department’s Rapid Action Team, responsible for crowd control during protests and riots, was less than two blocks away from the shooting. The team was given orders to not get included in between dueling demonstrators.
“Offered the enormity of the press coverage over the previous a number of years concerning clashes in between left- and right-leaning demonstration groups in the downtown core of Portland, Accuseds understood or need to have known that violent clashes would happen,” Cauble composed in the court pleadings.
The lawsuit declares that the city and mayor “cultivated an environment in which demonstrators on both sides could reasonably expect a skeletal and passive cops existence on the weekend of August 29, 2020.”
Knowing the possibility for violence as the two groups clashed the city and cops stopped working “to divert the caravan of right-leaning demonstrators” far from the downtown area and then again failed to separate the two sides with the fights started, OregonLive specified.
Bob Priceacts as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an initial member of the Breitbart Texas group. Price is a routine panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s Sunday-morning talk program,What’s Your Point? Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.