Murder Begets Murder
Whether Michael Reinoehl knew he was lying when he said he murdered Aaron "Jay" Danielson "in self-defense," who can say? I see him as a moth willing to burn for his five days in the spotlight
Art begets art. Surround yourself with people putting good things in the world and - zwoop! - you find yourself wanting to do the same, and when I say art I mean anything you build, a garage door, a creampuff, some music. For more on this I recommend Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.” I (almost) always love it when writers narrate their own books, as Rubin does here. Bonus for me: Rubin has a voice near-identical to my friend Jonathan’s.
Jonathan was a man of many appetites, and I have never known anyone as appreciative of food, which may or may not have to do with his eating out every meal - and stay with me here - for five years. Yes, lunch and dinner at different Portland restaurants every day for five years, because his kitchen was undergoing renovation. (Don’t ask.) He and my husband ate lunch out nearly every day, Korean barbecue in Beaverton, Thai food downtown, Russian on the east side, Italian on the west. I sometimes joined them, and if I had a dime for each time Jonathan put something into his mouth and said, “Rommelmann! You gotta try this, it’s incredible!” I’d have maybe three dollars. Jonathan was in our kitchen many times during the week and I often cooked for him, including recipes he would text me. I love cooking and the arrangement was perfect, as was being taken to restaurants were he knew the owners and their kids and their parents, where the feeding and the stories had no end, until they did. Jonathan died this spring at age 63, from a cancer I did not know he had. He was such a massive part of our lives in Portland; ridiculously full of praise because I baked him an Ooey-Gooey Butter Cake and, when my daughter got married in the backyard - a wedding we planned and pulled together in four days - showing up with enough take-out sushi to feed the assembled four times over. It was his nature to give and to give, and he made the world and us better.
I didn’t plan to write about Jonathan after I read about the estate of Michael Reinoehl suing law enforcement, claiming Reinoehl “did not need to die.” Reinoehl was fatally shot by U.S. Marshals on Sept. 3, 2020, five days after he, Reinoehl, murdered Aaron “Jay” Danielson during a protest on the streets of downtown Portland.
“The country is in the grip of a hallucinatory fever, one that has people seeing as monstrous or heroic any action that confirms that their side is right and the other is wrong,” I wrote at the time, in “When a Killing Becomes a Rorschach Test: Dispatch From Portland,” a test that, with the advent of the lawsuit, I feel as though we are all still taking. While it is possible that law enforcement could have averted killing Reinoehl, it is incontestable that the 48-year-old was troubled, someone who seemed desperate to alight on a cause rather than the antifa- and BLM-supporter he professed to be. Reinoehl was sloppy and daring and whether he knew he was lying when he said he shot in self-defense, who can say? I see him as a moth willing to burn for his five days in the spotlight.
Here is how the killing happened: Portland was in its fourth month of nightly protests. Earlier in the day, a Saturday, a truck caravan of Trump supporters, including those from the Vancouver, Washington-based group Patriot Prayer, rolled through Portland. The left shot Super-Soakers full of urine and bear spray; the right brandished guns. As has been the case during every activist-on-activist confrontation, no one was seriously hurt. Reinoehl would change this.
