A Black food truck owner was attacked by a white man yelling racial slurs in Southeast Portland. The video of the attack has sparked outrage and the victim has sought legal assistance in tracking down his attacker, according to OregonLive.
Two days ago, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump posted a video of a white man beating down a Black man on a sidewalk in Portland then walking away casually with his hands in his pocket. That Black man was Darell Preston, owner of LoRell’s Chicken Shack. The report says Preston was on the phone with his wife trying to deliver food when the man blindsided him with punches and stomped him into the ground while allegedly screaming the N-word. Drivers who witnessed the incident were heard in the video screaming for the man to stop, honking their horns.
Preston suffered a broken nose, fractures face and lacerations to his eyes and mouth, according to his GoFundMe organized by his brother-in-law. Preston was left so traumatized by the incident, he could barely talk to the police, his lawyer said. Also, his face was so swollen, he could hardly speak.
Read more from OregonLive:
Police responded to the food cart pod on June 15, but a spokesperson for the bureau said June 20 that Preston declined to talk with the officers at length.
“It took officers several minutes to convince the victim to come out of the foot cart to talk with them,” spokesperson Terri Wallo Strauss said last week. “Once the victim was out he told officers he was delivering food and was ‘attacked.’ When the officer asked for more detail on exactly what happened, the victim refused to say more and locked himself in the cart.”
Detectives with the Police Bureau’s Major Crimes Unit started investigating the attack as a bias crime after speaking with Preston’s family on June 19, said police spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Allen. Portland police did not immediately open a bias crime investigation because no elements of that crime were described to officers at the scene, Allen said.
Being Black and minding your business isn’t even safe. According to the Oregon Department of Justice, 2,887 bias incidents have been reported to their hotline in 2022. Of those reports, 903 of them were determined to be hate crimes.
It’s been almost two weeks since Preston was attacked and the police department still haven’t found the suspect. Watch Twitter find him faster than the cops.