PORTLAND, Ore. — A man who was stabbed in the neck last week while trying to stop a man from shouting anti-Muslim insults at two young women on a Portland, Oregon, light-rail train said Wednesday that the city should focus on the girls, not him.
An emotional Micah Fletcher said in a six-minute video on his Facebook page that Portland has a ‘‘white savior complex,’’ and that residents are heaping praise on him, but that the real victims are the women. He says they must be traumatized from being targets of hate and from the deaths of two other men who also tried to intervene.
‘‘These people need to be reminded that this is about them, that they are the real victims here,’’ he said.
Jeremy Joseph Christian is accused of stabbing to death Ricky Best, 53, and Taliesin Namkai-Meche, 23. Prosecutors say he attacked them after they confronted him for harassing two young black women, one of whom wore a Muslim head covering.
Fletcher, a 21-year-old student at Portland State University and a poet, also stood up to Christian. His wound was within millimeters of being fatal, court documents say. He has been released from the hospital and attended Christian’s first court hearing.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Associated Press Writer Steven Dubois contributed to this report.
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Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus .
