How We Adjudicate Murdered Children Tells Us Who We Are (Audio)

On April 17, 2021, a six-week-old baby boy was found limp in a North Portland apartment. His father, Dakota Kurtis Means, was with him. The boy, Hunter, was taken to the hospital with “brain bleeds, a fractured skull and broken ribs,” according to the Oregonian. Six weeks later, he was taken off life support and declared dead. His father was charged in his son’s death.

“I didn’t get to know him that well,” Hunter’s mother told the paper. Hunter would go down as the youngest known person murdered in Portland in 2021, a record-setting year for homicide, a record the city surpassed in 2022, with 101 murders.

While it is true I often write about murdered children, I did not know about the infant’s death until yesterday, when a photographer I worked with during my reporting in Portland posted this video she shot to Twitter.

That’s Means on the left. It was August 23, 2020, and people were just starting to gather for a “Back the Blue” event in front of Justice Center, the police station and jail in downtown Portland. I would write about the event for Reason, a day that would wind up getting pretty violent and, as you can see in the above video, started that way.

A word about violence and feeling not safe: I’ve waded into the protests dozens of times and never felt physically threatened, not really. Startled, yes; not exactly sure-footed when running in a pack of 2,000 people from a teargas volley at 1am in the morning? Absolutely. But physically under threat? No. As I would write in a different piece for Reason:

I am struck by how ungainly most of [the protesters] look; how the uniform is what bequeaths a sense of stature, of belonging, of power. Individually they are frail, uncoordinated, splay-footed, or fat. They are not an elite fighting force, regardless of how they appear as they move monolithically into the streets. 

There is power in being a faceless person in a mob of other faceless people. There is imagined power, too, in taking photos of your perceived enemies. This is what’s happening in the video, the girl with PRESS across her chest and her friend were shooting me; they and their cohorts did this incessantly all summer, and you can see by my response how much it did not unseat me; I just wanted to talk with them. I can see, too, by the video how nervous this makes the guy, who, stumped for what to say, asks me to put my mask on; can see how with the littlest encouragement PRESS girl nods along with my questions. I will maintain that one-on-one near everyone in these crowds believe they are doing right thing, or don’t want to be perceived by their peers as not doing the right thing.

The exception makes the rule.

Dakota Kurtis Means, who later in the day would swing a metal pole at me, was an unhinged person. I will qualify my statement that I never felt physically threatened with, it is not fun to have a man who a half-hour before has told you, “I’ll shave your shit right off your fucking head” swing a metal pole at you; I did have to walk wide of that. Means appeared to be disturbed and dangerous, an impression that would prove true: The next day, on August 24, he would threaten a federal employee with a paintball gun, telling him, “the next time, it’s going to be an AR.” For this infraction, he was sentenced in January 2021 to time served and one-year probation.

“I regret my decision that day,” Means told the court. “I take full responsibility for what I have done. ... I know it’s not going to happen again.”

Three months later, he assaulted his six-week old son, resulting in the child’s death. Requiesce in pace.

I spent an afternoon last week in a Zoom with Portland DA Mike Schmidt. Schmidt did not skirt the rise of drug addiction deaths, murder, assault, and car theft in Portland. He talked about the dearth of public defenders, resulting in more and more cases being dismissed. This last might account for a Dakota Kurtis Means serving no time for threatening a federal employee, and I would agree, if equivocally, that pointing a paintball gun at someone during the very chaotic days and nights of Portland’s summer of rage is a crime that, in some cases, might be dealt with softly.

But here’s the problem: When you create flex in the system for certain crimes, when a felony becomes a misdemeanor, when assault becomes a thing the DA’s office doesn’t have time for, the system corrodes. And then, and especially if part of the forgiving system is based on ideology, some look at the corrosion and call it good, call it humane, emphasize, as Schmidt repeatedly did on the Zoom call, that you need to provide opportunity and compassion to those who commit crimes: What were they dealing with? How can we help? How can we make their future better while still protecting the community?

It is the day after Easter, and this morning I looked over the Spiritual Works of Mercy that some of my more observant friends had posted.

I looked at each instruction and saw where I hopefully measure up, where I fall short. Each of us can always do better. I am going on record here as saying, Portland must do better. Anyone who’s spent time reading my work knows that I feel myself to be shouting this from the shore every single day. Someone in the DA’s office told me last week, “It’s not a binary decision. It can be an ‘and’,” meaning, we can show compassion to those who commit crimes AND to their victims and potential victims.

As it stands, Portland has, through its misguided pitch at good intentions, pretty much punted on the victims, this fact is staring every Portlander and anyone else paying attention in the face.

Dakota Kurtis Means, taken after 2020 assault on federal employee

Last night I asked a friend, the very good novelist, journalist and screenwriter Peter Blauner, who’s written about crime for 30 years, what sort of sentence he would have imposed on Means, for the murder of his child.

“Twenty-five years to life,” he said. When I told him that the sentence was 12.5 years, he said, “No, no, that’s fucked.”

But in Portland, it’s not fucked. It’s justice in action. Also, you should know: Means was not sentenced for committing murder, he was allowed to plead guilty to one count of Manslaughter in the First Degree and one count of Criminal Mistreatment in the First Degree. “The charges stem from an incident in April 2021, in which Means was found to have caused the death of his infant son,” according to the statement from the DA’s office.

Is “caused the death of” a euphemism? Because I can tell you, when I wrote about Amanda Stott-Smith throwing her two children off the Sellwood Bridge, resulting in the drowning death of her four year-old son Eldon, no one sought to sand off the edges. They called it murder and charged her with murder and aggravated murder, a capital crime.

So what has changed between 2009, when Amanda killed her child, and 2021, when Means killed his? Or more specifically, what has changed in Portland…