The estate of Aaron Danielson, murdered by Antifa terrorist Michael Reinoehl on August 29 last year, has sued Portland, Oregon, for its role in the crime by permitting Reinoehl and his terrorist comrades to control the city.
Reineiohl murdered the Trump supporter in cold blood. Federal and local law enforcement tracked him to a hideout, where the left-wing extremist fired on police. Reinoehl, who confessed to the killing to a journalist, went down in a hail of bullets.
The lawsuit filed in federal court on Friday accuses the city of negligence, the city’s Oregonian reported.
Danielson’s broken-hearted family hopes suing the city for $13 million.
The Lawsuit
The lawsuit says Portland, which permitted the Antifa terrorists to seize virtual control of the city, created a “culture of vigilante policing” that led to Danielson’s murder, the newspaper reported:
“We are seeking justice for the preventable death of a young man, gunned down in a city with a dangerous and deadly hands-off approach to public safety. Time and time again, City leadership and law enforcement have failed to find an effective response to clashing groups of protesters,” Christopher L. Cauble, the estate’s attorney, said in a statement.
The suit seeks $3 million in economic and non-economic damages, and $10 million in punitive damages, the newspaper reported.
The lawsuit says, “Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt of playing a role by broadcasting last summer that he had adopted a new policy and generally wouldn’t pursue what he considered public order crimes such as criminal mischief, interfering with an officer or a stand-alone riot charge, and instead would focus on deliberate property damage and threats of force or actual force against others.”
The lawsuit claims that police were nearby, but did nothing, the newspaper reported:
The suit alleges that officers from the Rapid Response Team, the Police Bureau’s specialized crowd control unit, were less than a two-block radius from the shooting but were following orders not to get involved that day between dueling demonstrators.
“Given the enormity of the press coverage over the past several years regarding clashes between left- and right-leaning protest groups in the downtown core of Portland, Defendants knew or should have known that violent clashes would occur,” Cauble wrote in the suit.
Police said they were occupied with rioters elsewhere and arrested 10 people that night. But the lawsuit argues that they ignored “brawls a week earlier in downtown between opposing demonstrators with bats, smoke bombs, shields and bear spray outside the Justice Center,” the newspaper reported:
The city and the mayor “fostered an environment in which demonstrators on both sides could reasonably anticipate a skeletal and passive police presence on the weekend of August 29, 2020,” the suit said.
The city and police failed ”to divert the caravan of right-leaning demonstrators” away from downtown and then failed to separate the feuding demonstrators that resulted, the suit said.
Mayor Ted Wheeler turned the city over to Antifa terrorists in 2018, when they began attacking officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’ve attacked police on multiple occasions.
The Murder
As the Oregonian reported, video surveillance clearly showed that Reinoehl targeted the Patriot Prayer activist.
After the shooting, Reinoehl fled to Lacey, Washington, about two hours north of Portland.
When federal marshals and local authorities ran him to ground there, he emerged from his hideout, tried to escape, then opened fire. Witnesses told the Olympian that about four-dozen shots were fired.
As The New American reported at the time, Reinoehl confessed to the murder in an interview with Vice:
He found himself in a confrontation with a man who he says threatened him and another protester with a knife. “Had I stepped forward, he would have maced or stabbed me,” Reinoehl said. …
He had not turned himself in, he said, because he believed right-wing protesters were collaborating with police, who will not protect him or his family.
“I am 100% ANTIFA all the way! I am willing to fight for my brothers and sisters!” the left-wing terrorist wrote on Instagram. “Even if some of them are too ignorant to realize what antifa truly stands for. We do not want violence but we will not run from it either!”
Frighteningly, leftists such as Erik Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, applauded the murder.
“He killed a fascist. I see nothing wrong with it, at least from a moral perspective,” Loomis wrote. “Tactically, that’s a different story. But you could say the same thing about John Brown.”
Hat tip: Breitbart
