sweeneyteeth.jpg

Bicycle commuter Andy Sweeney lost his once-perfect smile after a group of boys threw a traffic cone at him Saturday night.

(Courtesy of Andy Sweeney)

Andy Sweeney posted the selfie on Reddit, hoping to find the positive side to the violence that left him with a broken smile on a Northeast Portland street last weekend.

In the photo, the 20-year-old bicycle commuter and recent transplant from the Midwest flashed two shattered front teeth.



"Some kids threw a traffic cone at me while I was riding my bike down MLK," Sweeney wrote next to the photo of his now-jagged incisors. "Any other (expletive) areas I should avoid?"

Portland police, however, are taking Saturday night's unprovoked attack of Sweeney near Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Fargo Street more seriously.

It was at least the second time in less than a week that a group of teenagers had assaulted a bicyclist along MLK.

Last Tuesday night, Bill Lynch, 64, had just crossed MLK as he pedaled home from a garden party when someone in a group of "three to five young people" knocked him off his bicycle on the Northeast Going Street Neighborhood Greenway.

"They were walking down the middle of the street like they owned it," Lynch said. "I don't know what hit me. A strong fist? Something in someone hand? It hurt."

Lynch said he was riding past the group and the blow "came out of nowhere."

The retired former head of the Oregon Council on Developmental Disabilities suffered deep bruising to his ribs and a shoulder sprain from the blow. He said he isn't sure when he'll be able to get back on his bicycle.

“When I filed a police report the officer said similar nighttime incidents had occurred in the neighborhood recently,” Lynch writes in a flyer that he posted in his neighborhood to encourage people to be more vigilant. “I learned there was another attack on Aug. 19. In a couple of cases, the bicyclists were beaten and had their bikes stolen.”

Sgt. Pete Simpson, a Portland police spokesman, said the officer who took the report in Lynch's case "had heard of more" assaults. "But I'm not sure how many," Simpson said.

Police said they don't have enough information to say the incidents are connected. But the similarities are hard to deny. In fact, police have been taking reports of a group of juveniles harassing or assaulting people in the area for at least a month.

On the last Thursday night of July, Amy Wilson, who lives on Northeast Going Street just east of MLK, stepped out of her house after hearing three teens bashing in the windows of a car parked on the street.

One of the boys attacked her. "I suffered a four-hour concussion and I don't remember much," she said. "I was completely knocked out. My head hit the concrete."

Wilson was rushed to the emergency room, where she received 12 stitches. One side of her face remained bruised and swollen for days. Later, a neighbor told her that he saw what he suspected were the same group of teens hassling other cyclists a couple blocks over and nearly called the police that night.

Meanwhile, on OregonLive, a commenter going by Chris Freeman wrote that he was also attacked by a group of about five kids on bikes at Northeast Seventh Avenue and Stanton Street about 11 p.m. on Aug. 17. "One of them jumped off his bike and tried to push me over," he said. "Luckily I didn't lose my balance after being pushed and was able to get away."

And then there was Sweeney, who was attacked four days after Lynch was walloped off his bike.

Shortly before midnight, Sweeney was on his way home from the grocery store, riding south on MLK. He also didn't see the violence coming.

"I was coming up on these three kids," he said, "and they just threw a traffic cone at me. It hit me square in the teeth."

Sweeney described the encounter as "a blur" that prevented him from getting a good look at his attackers. The boys laughed and ran off, leaving him with a bloody mouth. "The pieces of my teeth were gone immediately," Sweeney said.

A police officer told Sweeney that it looked like he had a concussion. The bespectacled bike deliveryman for Jimmy John's sandwich shop said he didn't have the money to go to the hospital.

The next day, however, the pain became too much to bear. Sweeney used a credit card to pay to have pulp caps put on his teeth. "I needed something to cover the nerves," he said.

What the teeth really need, the dentist told Sweeney, is a root canal.

After seeing Sweeney's photo on Reddit, local bicyclist Tim Oberlander, a news editor at KGW, set up a GoFundMe.com account to help the stranger get his teeth fixed.

"I saw the broken teeth and his upbeat attitude," Oberlander said, "Apparently, he had just moved here and was trying to learn the city. I felt a little shameful that this happened to him in my town."

Sweeney, who moved to Portland from Illinois to take a break from college in July, said he's grateful for "the really kind gesture" but isn't sure he will take the money. At 4:45 p.m. Monday, when this story was first posted on OregonLive, the fund has collected $95 of the $1,000 goal. As of 10 a.m. Tuesday, it had reached $1,107.

"I didn't really ask for it," he said. "I'm trying to see if I can maybe get things covered by my parents' dental insurance."

If nothing else, Sweeney received a load of tips from Reddit readers on where to and not to bike in Northeast Portland because of possible traffic conflicts.

Stick to the bike lanes on North Vancouver and Williams, and the quieter Northeast Seventh Avenue, they said.

Oh, and among other busy thoroughfares, stay away from MLK. Obviously.

-- Joseph Rose