The stunned residents of Portland, Oregon have rallied around the families of two men who were brutally murdered and another who was seriously hurt while trying to help a pair of young women being harassed on a train by a man who took them for Muslims.
All three men were stabbed viciously in the throat by a suspect police identified as Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35. A known local white supremacist, he was arrested after onlookers chased the blood-soaked man as he tried to flee and then pointed him out to police.
The attack unfolded in just 10 minutes on a crowded train full of people heading off for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, a time for somber tributes to those killed in war but also the celebratory, if unofficial, beginning of the summer vacation season.
Witnesses said Christian raged against a 17-year-old Muslim girl in a hijab and her 16-year-old African-American friend, identified by the Oregonian newspaper as Destinee Hudson.
"He was saying that Muslims should die," Destinee's mother, Dyjuana Hudson, told the newspaper. "That they've been killing Christians for years."
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