PORTLAND — An Army veteran with first-aid training was one of the first people to help Micah Fletcher as the college student stumbled off a MAX train at the Hollywood Transit Center on May 26, 2017, clutching his neck and pleading for help.
Marcus Knipe put his hand on Fletcher’s neck to try to stop the bleeding as much as he could, he testified Wednesday. A woman gave him her child’s jacket and a baby blanket to use to apply pressure to the jagged wound.
Knipe said he had Fletcher sit on the ground and propped his back up against a pole.
“I told him he needed to match my breathing, calm down. … I knew his heart rate was elevated. If there was the slightest chance it was close to the jugular … it could burst and it would be very hard to keep him alive,” Knipe said as the second day of testimony began Wednesday in the MAX stabbings trial of Jeremy Christian.
Christian is accused of first-degree murder for fatally stabbing Ricky Best, 53, and Taliesin Namkai-Meche, 23, on the train that day and attempted first-degree murder for stabbing Fletcher, then 21 and a student at Portland State University who was on his way to his pizza job at the time.
Prosecutors allege Christian first stabbed Fletcher, then Namkai-Meche and Best as they stood nearby after Christian launched into a hate-filled diatribe on the crowded train with two teenage girls sitting nearby, one African American and one wearing a hijab.
Video shown in court Tuesday shows Fletcher running off the train after Christian swings his arm at Fletcher. Prosecutor Don Rees said Christian took a 4-inch folding knife from the pocket of his shorts and started stabbing.
Knipe said the bleeding Fletcher asked to call his mother — and Knipe said he could but not to mention how seriously he was hurt.
“I said … tell her you were hurt,” Knipe recalled. “Tell her you’re going to be OK. But if she knows (how bad it is) … she might get hysterical. … It might be bad for you. I said, ‘Keep it calm.’ ”
While on the phone, Fletcher asked his mom to tell his employer, Stark Street Pizza, that he wasn’t going to make it to work that day.
Knipe soon took Fletcher’s phone from him. “I didn’t want him moving his jaw or moving the muscles in his neck because it’d maybe cause more damage,” he said.
Another Army veteran, Morgan Noonan, testified that he was on the train and saw Christian stab both Namkai-Meche and Best. A former medic who rescued service members in combat, Noonan said he knew the men wouldn’t survive — and believed they knew it, too.
“A human being knows when they’re mortally wounded,” Noonan said. “You see it in their eyes, their behavior.”
Noonan said he tried to help but realized he couldn’t stop the bleeding. Namkai-Meche’s trachea was punctured and he was spitting blood. Best’s heart was pumping out blood onto the train floor, he said.
“Waves of (Best’s) blood were … lapping down the aisle,” Noonan said. “So I knew every time his heart beat that he was bleeding to death.”
Noonan said Best died quickly. As he spoke, members of the men’s families sitting in the courtroom gallery were visibly upset. A woman rubbed a young man’s back as he gazed toward the floor.
The prosecution said Best was dead when paramedics arrived and Namkai-Meche was still showing signs of life but was pronounced dead after he was rushed to the hospital.
Noonan said from the moment he stepped onto the Green Line train near Lloyd Center, “the hairs on the back of my neck went up.” Christian was yelling and the atmosphere was tense.
Witnesses and prosecutors have said a short while earlier, Christian was yelling racist and xenophobic slurs aimed at the teenage girls and condemning Muslims, Christians and Jews.
