Why We Should Write About the Murder of a Mother in Front of Her Children

The ideological winds shift, let the stories sweep in

“I’m not sure why the horrific 2022 murder of Rachael Abraham is trending,” I tweeted Saturday, linking a December 2022 feature I wrote about Abraham’s brutal death. Go ahead and read “A Murder in Portland,” or don’t.* Here are the bullet points:

• Abraham, mother of six young girls, is repeatedly beaten and strangled by her estranged boyfriend and father of her two youngest children, Mohammed Adan

• Adan is arrested, released for no bail, breaks off his GPS monitor, attacks Abraham again.

• Repeat. No judge imposes bail, despite Adan pledging to kill Abraham.

• After another attack, a judge imposes $20,000 bail. The $2000 surety required is paid by a private Portland bail fund.

• A week after being freed, Adan again breaks into Abraham’s home and beats, stabs and strangles her to death. The three youngest children, ages 7, 4 and 2, are in the home at the time.

The reason the story was trending is because New York Times columnist and Oregon resident Nicholas Kristof had that day run an Opinion piece called, “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” Here is the passage about Abraham’s murder, with some foreshadowing:

Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.

For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.

“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”

Consider a volunteer group called the Portland Freedom Fund that was set up to pay bail for people of color. The organization raised money from well-intentioned liberal donors, and the underlying problems were real: Bail requirements hit poor people hard.

In 2022, the Portland Freedom Fund helped a Black man named Mohamed Adan who had been arrested after allegedly strangling his former girlfriend, holding a gun to her head and then — in violation of a restraining order — cutting off his G.P.S. monitor and entering her building. “He told me that he would kill me,” the former girlfriend, Rachael Abraham, warned.

The Freedom Fund paid Adan’s bail, and he walked out of jail. A week later, Adan allegedly removed his G.P.S. monitor again and entered Abraham’s home. The police found Abraham’s body drenched in blood with a large knife nearby; three children were also in the house.

One of the links is to a piece I posted here, "A Murder in Portland" and the 1000 Blind Eyes,” which addressed, in January 2023, what Kristof was addressing in June 2024. I was grateful for the link, if more grateful for Abraham’s story to reach the wider world, something these stories sometimes have a hard time doing because of ideological barricades. My friend Jesse Singal pointed this out in a tweet:

I’ve had a people ask whether I feel vindicated. This question implies this is about me, when it’s about the stories. Am I angry that I might not have been able to sell Abraham’s story to the Times in 2022? I don’t know; maybe it’s my fault for not pitching it there, but I get the point, and yes, I am very glad that the paper of record et al seem ready to talk about some of the very bad things that have happened downstream from all the good intentions. Because I do care, viciously and vocally (and woe unto you if you drink wine with me because you will hear all about it), that any outlet would not have the courage to run a story about Rachael Abraham and the issues that led to her death, could be pressured out of seeing it worthy of examination, could whistle past her murder in the quest for a glorious and perfect future.

Here’s a question: How many mothers being murdered in front of their children is an acceptable number to, for instance, the civil rights attorney tweeting below, 1000, a million, all of them? He implies that anyone who aims for that number being zero is a racist and a fearmonger.

Later this morning, Sarah Hepola and I will discuss on the Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em podcast the perceived phenomena of who’s-allowed-to-write-what-when. I have never not written because the ideologues were going to come after me. They have and they will. I don’t care. I do care when the mainstream media turtles, when they let go of their best and brightest - Andy Mills and Donald McNeil Jr. come to mind - but the winds have shifted, let the stories live. Speaking of, check out Andy’s new podcast, Reflector; the best storytelling bar none.

*I aspire to be like John Doe who, while playing at a small club in Portland some time around 2012, told the crowd, “Go ahead and talk on your cellphones, I don’t give a shit.” Until then…