Hero of Portland stabbing attack urges media to focus on victims

Micah David-Cole Fletcher, 21, says, 'We need to remember, this is about those little girls'

Micah David-Cole Fletcher watched as Jeremy Joseph Christian was arraigned in Multnomah County Circuit Court in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian/AP)

He was held up as a hero without a cape — the sort of brave, compassionate human being whose actions while on board a Portland light-rail train last week made his mother proud.

By Wednesday, though, Micah David-Cole Fletcher seemed to have had enough; enough of the media spotlight, the many laudatory internet stories and even the swelling donations.

So Fletcher, 21, sat down in a room, turned on a camera and decided to speak out. He was one of at least three people who stepped in to try to stop a man’s xenophobic tirade directed at two girls Friday. That man killed two other men, the authorities say, and Fletcher suffered a serious stab wound.

But Fletcher, a Portland State University student, was worried that while he was being lionised, two other very important victims of Friday’s attack were being largely forgotten.

“We need to remember, this is about those little girls,” Fletcher said in a video that he posted on Facebook on Wednesday. “Just remember that, you know, they got hurt too.”

During the approximately seven-minute video, Fletcher thanked supporters for their generosity but worried that long-standing local attitudes and biases caused aid to flow more freely to him than to one of the girls. By Wednesday night, the video had been viewed more than 80,000 times.

“We in Portland have this weird tendency to continue patterns that we’ve done forever, and one of them is this same old, just to put it bluntly, white saviour complex,” he said. “Suffice to say, I think it’s immensely, immensely morally wrong and irresponsible how much money we have gotten as opposed to how much support, money, love, kindness, that has been given to that little girl.”

Fletcher, who identified himself as a poet, expressed his misgivings less than a day after he attended the first court appearance for the man accused of the fatal attack.

An affidavit filed Tuesday also laid out new details about what happened. Prosecutors said the man charged with murder in the attack, Jeremy Joseph Christian, had shouted at two girls on the train, one described as “African-American,” and the other as an “African-American Muslim who was wearing traditional Muslim dress.”

During Christian’s profanity-laced tirade, which appeared to be aimed at the girls, he told them to “go home” and referred to Isis and Saudi Arabia, according to the court document.

Soon after, a tussle began in which Christian and Fletcher shoved each other, the affidavit said. After Fletcher told the man to get off the train, Christian stabbed Fletcher in the neck, the documents said, before proceeding to fatally stab two other men, Ricky John Best, 53, and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche, 23.

Fletcher’s wound to the left side of his neck “missed being a fatal injury by millimetres” the documents said. He did not immediately respond to a Facebook message seeking comment Wednesday night, and members of his family also did not respond to a phone call and an email.

But in his video, Fletcher called on viewers to “imagine” that they were one of the girls on the train.

“Her life is never going to be the same,” he said, before marvelling that “those brave young girls” lived through Friday’s harassment and attack and yet “find ways to wake up in the morning with smiles on their faces.”

Copyright The New York Times