Rachel Macy, one of the 53 people on the same light rail car as Jeremy Christian, pictured at Portland Community College (Beth Nakamura/Staff)

BY ANDREW THEEN AND SHANE DIXON KAVANAUGH

One year ago, a brazen attack shook this city to its core.

Horror played out aboard a rush hour MAX train as it pulled into the Hollywood Transit Center.

It was TriMet’s worst day, and one of Portland’s darkest. The immediate aftermath prompted soul searching from a shaken community.

Most of the story is well-known.

There were the three strangers brutally stabbed.

There were the two teenage girls they sought to shield from one man’s racist rant.

There was the suspected killer who had spewed hate before he began to slash.

But some 113 people were on the train that day. Others waited on the platform. Few have shared their stories and struggles.

The single mom, who gave up a baby blanket to help stanch survivor Micah Fletcher’s bleeding.

The former paramedic, who desperately tried to save Ricky Best’s life and was with him as he died.

And the grandmother who could only apologize to Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche as she held the dying Reed College alum in her arms. “The world is so cruel,” she told him.

Eleven transit riders or passersby sat down for interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive about the lasting impacts of the tragedy.

They include a student being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder who still clutches at his neck – the very spot where all three stab victims were wounded, two mortally. And they include a light-rail passenger who says every time he gets on the MAX he can still smell blood, “like cold metal.”

Here are their stories.

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Beth Nakamura/Staff

Michael Kennedy

Michael Kennedy watched Ricky Best bleed to death despite his efforts to keep him alive.

He’s since watched men with ties to neo-Nazi groups and the white nationalist movement run for elected office in California, Massachusetts and even Oregon.

In March, an avowed white supremacist captured the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Illinois.

“It’s been bewildering, and it makes me so angry,” Kennedy said.

A self-described refugee from the deep South, Kennedy said there’s a clear line that runs between rising political extremism and the person suspected of fatally stabbing Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and wounding Micah Fletcher.

Jeremy Christian, Kennedy said, was an angry white man and outspoken racist. His bigotry, Kennedy believes, blossomed into violence.

“I think it does a lot of disservice if we don’t have the broader conversation about what’s happening,” he said. “That behavior’s becoming normalized.”

Kennedy, 41, was riding the train home to Lents when the attack occurred. A former paramedic, he rushed into train car and saw Best on the ground.

He cleared the dying man’s airway. He performed chest compressions. The father of four didn’t survive.

“I’ve seen people killed in accidents, tornadoes, car crashes,” Kennedy said. “None were ever killed by hatred.”

He’s reminded of the episode often. Each time he hears someone speaking a foreign language on the MAX. Each time he’s at a crowded concert or shopping at Clackamas Town Center.

Kennedy said he’s always watching for the angry white guy.

“I’m not running away if something happens, I’ll tell you that much,” he said. “It’s not in my nature.”

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

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Beth Nakamura/Staff

Chase Robinson:

When the MAX doors opened, Chase Robinson couldn’t decide what to do.

He could chase after Jeremy Christian or stay on the train and help three people stabbed during an 11-second explosion of violence moments earlier.

The 26-year-old had no medical training, so he ran after the knife-wielding man he’d begun moving to confront seconds earlier.

“I distinctly remember this thought that I’m never, ever going to be able to sleep at night if I just watch this guy get away,” Robinson said.

He ended up not sleeping much that week anyway. Every time he blinked, he saw people die with knives in their necks.

Robinson had removed his headphones after hearing Christian shouting at Shawn Forde, a black man and passenger who Robinson said was trying to defuse a simmering situation.

He started toward Christian when Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche pushed past, filming with a cell phone. Soon after, Christian stabbed Namkai-Meche and two other men. Robinson said Christian then looked at him, knife aloft.

Robinson backed up. Christian got off the train. “It was a lot to take in,” he said.

The U.S. Bank worker, who spent much of his childhood in Sandy and moved to Portland in November 2016, is frustrated by what he hears, or doesn’t hear, coming out of the White House. “When we can’t just go ahead and say neo-Nazis are bad, that gives them the blanket endorsement they’re looking for,” he said.

When he thinks of that day, Robinson thinks about the people taking off clothes, kneeling in a pool of blood to help a stranger.

A lot of people got off the train that day and went home, but a lot stayed.

There was one bad guy, he said. But there were 50 good people.

-- Andrew Theen

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Katie Currin

She had a diaper in one hand. Aaden, her 6-month-old, squirmed near the bus depot at the Hollywood Transit Center.

That’s when Katie Currin heard the screams from an arriving MAX train. Next came the cries for someone to call 911.

“At first, I freaked out,” Currin, 22, recalled. “For my sake. For my son’s sake.”

But she felt drawn to the commotion.

On the train platform, she saw Micah Fletcher as he struggled to stop blood oozing from his neck.

Without thinking, she pulled a baby blanket from Aaden’s stroller. She handed it to someone who had started providing first aid to the wounded young man.

Currin had a startling realization: She and Fletcher had met downtown two years before — shortly after she moved to Portland from central Oregon.

“I couldn’t believe it was him on the platform,” she said.

A lot has happened in the year since. Aaden, now a toddler, was removed from Currin’s custody. She’s fighting to get him back.

She recently moved from a sobriety home into her own place near the Moda Center. She got engaged.

Currin hates the MAX, she said.

By necessity she must ride it every day. To buy groceries. To visit her son. To get to and from appointments.

She worries about her safety.

“It’s just a feeling, you know?” Currin said. “I always have a knife on me.”

She paused. “I haven’t used it. Yet.”

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

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Jason Falquist

Jason Falquist is not much of a crier.

He didn’t cry much when his father died in 2016. He didn’t shed a tear when his family’s dog died last May. The 35-year-old doubts his wife, Lindsay, had ever seen him cry. But Falquist, who works at Liberty Mutual Insurance in the Lloyd District, had never experienced anything like May 26, 2017.

The next day, he sat on the couch in his southeast Portland home, his three-month-old son asleep nearby, and lost it. He thought about Ricky Best and his family grieving nearby. He thought about Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and the life he wouldn’t get to live.

But while others jumped to help, Falquist didn’t take off his shirt or do something to stop the victims’ bleeding.

Instead, he jumped on his 10-speed Schwinn and rode home as cops sped toward the Hollywood Transit Station.

“I had time to do it, and I could have done it,” he said, “but I didn’t do it.”

Conversations with friends and family later assured him he wouldn’t have been able to save them. “But the fact that I paused, and I didn’t help him when I could have, that was weighing on me a lot.

“What does that say about me as a person, that I would just sit there?”

Some what-ifs still bother him.

But in retrospect, the Portland native says he wouldn’t have done anything differently with respect to Christian. His motto is to stay out of such conflicts and let the police handle it.

Falquist said he’s always been amused by people like Jeremy Christian who rant and rave on the MAX.

“He kind of reminded me of the Comic Bookstore Guy from The Simpsons,” he said. Pony tail. Baggy jean shorts. “He dressed like a high school loser.” Until he pulled out a knife, Falquist didn’t take Christian seriously.

The incident hasn’t changed his view of his hometown at all. “It’s not all hipsters riding around zoo bombing or whatever,” he said. “There’s real problems, and there’s always been a certain level of violence.”

But Falquist is much more aware of his surroundings. Before, he didn’t pay attention. Now, he is more on edge around strangers or on transit. Nobody gets the benefit of the doubt he gave Christian that day.

Everybody is a threat.

-- Andrew Theen

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Charlie Button

Charlie Button still avoids the MAX if he can.

For months, the 22-year-old Portland State University student rode the bus instead. Now, he drives from Gresham to his chemistry classes downtown.

Button was one of the passengers with Ricky Best when he died. Button supported Best’s neck. He cleared blood from his airway. Sometimes, he feels a physical manifestation of the trauma. He holds his neck. He still gets anxiety attacks.

“I used to be fine walking around at night,” Button, a former high school football player at Centennial High School, said of his 162nd and Southeast Stark Street neighborhood, “and offering people money if they needed any help. Now I get really anxious being cornered.”

Button, a longtime lifeguard at the East Portland Community Center, has always wanted to work in medicine. His mother is a nurse at Randall Children’s Hospital in North Portland. His father is an ultrasound technician.

“I’d really love to be a pediatrician,” Button said. “That’s if they’d want me.”

He’s trained in advanced life support at the hospital and is CPR-trained thanks to his lifeguarding days. But little can prepare you for trying to save a life while in a pool of blood, one eye still wondering if the attacker is still on the train.

Button has undergone Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, a type of psychotherapy used to help treat those with post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’s had some breakthroughs at therapy. “At least I was able to be there for Ricky,” he said.

But the trauma kept coming.

Two months after the stabbings, his father was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Last September, his younger brother, Henry, was in a car wreck. Henry suffered a traumatic brain injury and a shattered pelvis, and he has multiple steel rods in his left leg. His brother’s friend and passenger died.

Charlie dropped down to one class and moved back in with his mother to help out.

He hopes to go back to school full-time in the fall to finish up. Then he’ll apply to an internship at Oregon Health & Science University to study viruses.

Button has a takeaway.

“Just be kind to one another.”

Then he asked a question.

“Has everyone else on there been getting help?”

-- Andrew Theen

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Beth Nakamura/Staff

Rachel Macy

When she made it to her Southeast Portland apartment, Rachel Macy still had a bloody handprint on her face, a memento of what she called the soul-to-soul connection she felt hours earlier as she comforted one of three men stabbed on the MAX.

“Some sick part of me didn’t want to take them off,” Macy said of her bloody clothes. “I didn’t want to wash him away.”

Earlier, the 46-year-old mother of five, and grandmother to two, held Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche in her arms and apologized to the 23-year-old Reed College alum. “The world is so cruel,” she said. “You’re a beautiful man.”

Namkai-Meche's last words to Macy: "Tell everyone on this train I love them."

Macy wasn’t in Portland of her own accord that day. She was arrested and charged with robbery for walking into the Shell gas station on U.S. 26 in Warm Springs Dec. 19, 2016 with a BB gun. She walked out with roughly $1,700 and a lifetime of regret. She’s forbidden from going to the reservation.

In an interview, Macy said she’d snapped under financial pressure and the strain of enduring decades of an abusive relationship. She confessed to the crime the day after and expressed “remorse for her actions and said she had acted out of desperation,” Chad Lapp, an FBI special agent wrote in the affidavit describing the crime on the Warm Springs Reservation.

Macy said she’s always admitted she did it. “I have to pay the consequences. I know what I did was wrong.” She signed a plea agreement Jan. 11 and is awaiting a sentencing hearing with U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown on June 26.

“It is as scary as that day on the train,” she said of the hearing.

(Click to read the rest of the story)

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Amee Pacheco (did not wish to be photographed)

Amee Pacheco doesn’t like to talk about what happened on the train.

When Jeremy Christian got on the Green Line, he sat next to the 37-year-old mother of two. He ranted, then a group of passengers confronted him. Pacheco pleaded for calm, but to no avail.

Instead, she had a front-row seat to horror.

The North Tabor resident struggled in the aftermath, but for her, an essential truth emerged:

“It’s not an isolated event,” she said of Christian’s anti-Muslim and racist outburst. “It’s what happens when we allow whiteness to go unchecked.”

Pacheco is white, but now everyone in her life gets the race talk.

“It’s not something that should surprise anyone when it happens,” she said, adding that she gave Christian the “benefit of the doubt” that day because he was white. “It’s a byproduct of our white supremacist and racist society. All of those things led to Jeremy Christian.”

Pacheco said she’s long known the basics -- Portland’s racist history, Oregon outlawing people of color, the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, and the people of color who called attention to the systemic woes.

She knows, too, she benefited from it all.

But after watching Christian spew hate that day, simply knowing was no longer enough.

“I think a lot of my innocence is gone,” said Pacheco, a grant writer for a nonprofit salmon conservation group. “I’ve confronted some truths about myself that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Pacheco joined two Facebook groups where she pays monthly dues – what she described as reparations -- to benefit black women and people of color.

She’s called out white friends or family on social media for being oblivious, racist or not acknowledging their privilege.

She’s made sure her 19-month-old has toys and books that don’t only feature white kids to decrease the “whiteness is default mentality.”

It’s all her way, she said, of “dismantling” a system she said creates people like Christian.

Pacheco has ridden light rail for more than 20 years, and aside from a few sketchy moments hasn’t felt afraid.

How much of that history is because she’s white? “All of it.”

Riding unafraid is one of the privileges of being white. “You get to move around the space,” she said, “and not be bothered.”

-- Andrew Theen

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Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

Wesley Smith Jr.

A change in plans had left Wesley Smith Jr., 43, with a canceled studio session. So the hip-hop artist stepped onto a MAX train at the Northeast 7th Avenue Station — and into the middle of Jeremy Christian’s bigoted rant.

“Racism, I don’t deal with it well,” said Smith, whose stage name is Craze MC.

Neither, Smith said, did the bearded young man whom he found himself beside near the back of the train. The two talked. They were both upset. Smith fumed loudly.

As Christian continued to seethe and spew threats at two teenage girls, the young man approached him with his camera phone. Thirty seconds later, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche had a knife plunged into his neck.

“Maybe it was my expression, my words that got Taliesin to go up to him,” said Smith, a Fairview resident. “I feel like he took my place on that train. I’ve lived with that guilt for nearly a year.”

Looking back, he wonders why so few passengers stood up or spoke out before the attack.

Smith grew up in Portland’s Piedmont neighborhood. He recalled being a white kid in what was then a predominately black area. But he never felt out of place.

“The city seemed like it had more unity back then than it does now,” he said.

Smith believes a lesson he learned from his friends and neighbors in North Portland was lost that day on the MAX.

“You’re human first. We’re all the same.”

Smith sighed. “People still don’t get that.”

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

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Larry Blackwood

Larry Blackwood can still smell the blood that gathered in pools near the front of the train.

“Like cold metal,” he said. “Disgusting.”

Blackwood, 28, had finished his shift as a Portland City Grill line cook and was riding the MAX to his second job as a Chevron station attendant when the attack unfolded.

Amid the confusion, he jumped out of the second car, only to discover a pair of bodies on the ground and a third person bleeding on the platform. He heard a woman scream that a man was getting away.

Blackwood took off up the platform stairs. He pursued Jeremy Christian across the overpass above Interstate 84. Terrified but unable to stop, he called his mom in Florida.

“She was like, ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’” Blackwood recalled. “I said, ‘It’s kind of late, Mom. I’m already going after the guy.’”

Shirtless and still wielding a knife, Christian barked threats at Blackwood from a distance, he said. But he and two strangers continued after Christian as police cruisers caught up with the suspect.

Using the phone on his camera, Blackwood began filming Christian’s encounter with police. The clip would go viral.

Hours later, Blackwood found himself sobbing. His body shook.

He didn’t show up to work at Chevron that night. Instead, he walked more than 7 miles to his apartment in Milwaukie.

Blackwood’s got a new second job now, one as a cook at Shut Up and Eat in the Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood.

It’s a good job, but there’s catch: To get there, he has to take the No. 75 bus from the Hollywood Transit Center. The smell of cold metal hits him as he arrives.

“It’s like some cruel joke from the universe,” he said.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

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Alvin Hall

Alvin Hall heard screaming from the other car as the train pulled to Hollywood Transit Station.

He stepped off and saw Micah Fletcher clutching his neck.

Hall, a 43-year-old former Marine nuclear biological chemical defense specialist who works at Liberty Mutual insurance, saw passengers tending to victims inside a bloody train car.

All he could think: “Where’d he go?"

Passengers pointed to the bridge spanning Interstate 84. Hall and fellow MAX rider Chase Robinson were trying to keep an eye on Jeremy Christian, but Hall worried the suspect would escape. So the burly, bearded father of 13- and 7-year-old boys sprinted to within spitting distance as Christian hid behind Providence Portland Medical Center.

Hall said Christian stood behind a tree with a knife in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other. He was pouring the brown cola on his bloody arm when he spotted Hall.

‘What are you going to narc, you (expletive) snitch,” Hall recalled Christian said.

“You want some of this?” Christian yelled, then ran at Hall with the knife. Hall turned and ran.

“I realized he was tiring, and so I turned around and started taunting him,” Hall recalled. “Not a great idea.”

Hall didn’t witness the attack, but he still thinks about it often. It creeps into his mind, but it hasn’t tainted his view of the city or region. “For the most part, we’re really good people here,” he said.

In other parts of the country, he said, you might see a local church holding a garage sale in support of the local KKK chapter.

“I don’t approve of it whatsoever, but it doesn’t shock me that it exists,” he said of hateful views. “It shouldn’t, but it does.”

Hall wishes Christian’s trial, scheduled for next year, could happen sooner. “I hate that it’s kind of made him the celebrity,” he said.

Hall doesn’t consider himself a hero, but his oldest son disagrees. At a barbecue last summer, a friend teased Hall and asked why he didn’t disarm the suspect when he encountered him “Did you forget your training?” the man asked.

Hall’s son stood up and yelled, “My dad’s a hero. You didn’t do anything.”

-- Andrew Theen

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Marcus Knipe

A cop at the scene of the crime that day called him a hero.

Marcus Knipe insists he’s not.

“I work with heroes every day,” he said during a recent break from his job at the Portland VA Medical Center.

The Fairview husband and father believes he happened to be at the right place at the right time — waiting with his family for a downtown MAX to the Rose Festival.

Chaos on the platform suddenly cut through the quiet calm of the afternoon.

Knipe, 34, watched as Micah Fletcher staggered out of an eastbound train clutching his throat.

His instincts, sharpened by a military tour in Iraq, kicked in.

Knipe knew he had to grab the injured man and get him to the ground. He had to calm Fletcher quickly in order to slow the bleeding.

A woman handed Knipe her daughter’s pink hoodie. Another a gave him a baby blanket from her stroller.

“It was the best we could do until we got a sterile dressing on Micah’s wound,” said Knipe, who joined the Army after growing up in Southeast Portland and Gresham.

He asked the frightened man in his arms to match his long, slow breaths. The two held hands.

Relaxed, Fletcher was able to call his mother and ask her to notify his work he would not be coming in that evening, Knipe recalled. Paramedics arrived shortly after.

Knipe and Fletcher have stayed in touch sporadically. Otherwise, he thinks little about the attack that brought them together.

“It was a situation that really sucked, and I did what I could,” Knipe said. “I now need to move on and support my family.”

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh