Facing a total of $20 million in two lawsuits, TriMet and the Portland Police Bureau said in court filings this week that they aren’t at fault for the May 2017 MAX train stabbings that left two men dead.

Only Jeremy Christian, the man charged in the killings, is responsible, they claim.

The two agencies are asking a civil jury to place the blame where they say it belongs.

The families of MAX train stabbing victims Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best filed the suits in May 2019. They fault the transit agency and police for not arresting and banning Jeremy Christian from the transit system the day before he allegedly killed the two men.

The lawsuits say TriMet and police had two opportunities to intervene to prevent the deaths of Namkai-Meche, 23, and Best, 53, in the 24 hours before Christian is accused of attacking them. The men were stabbed in the neck on a train pulling into Northeast Portland’s Hollywood transit station on May 26, 2017.

The suits say Portland police didn’t arrest Christian after they were called to the Rose Quarter MAX station on the night of of May 25, 2017, based on a report by an African American woman who said she was riding MAX when Christian threatened her life and then threw a Gatorade bottle at her face, injuring her eye.

Both suits say that same night, Christian went on to board another train, then rant about people of various religions and threatened to stab the people around him.

Jeremy Christian is accused of aggravated murder and other crimes on a MAX train in May 2017.

Christian isn’t believed to have money to pay the potential $20 million in judgments against him. If civil jurors find Christian 100 percent responsible, that means the families would likely walk away with nothing. But that could represent a legal success for TriMet and the city, who would be off the hook for any financial responsibility.

Christian was served Tuesday in jail with this week’s filings, known as third-party complaints.

The lawsuits have been put on hold until Christian can be tried in criminal court, in a trial scheduled to start in January. Christian’s lawyers have indicated that they could argue Christian is “guilty except for insanity” -- essentially that Christian’s mental illness at the time of the killings was too profound to hold him criminally accountable or sentence him to death.

This week’s court filings were first reported by KATU Friday.

-- Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

o_aimee

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