Black Man Was Shot Dead In Oregon After Hitting On A White Man’s Girlfriend

Cranston then start­ed hav­ing “some words” with Washington, which esca­lat­ed to vio­lence, Hummel said.

He con­tin­ued: “There was some push­ing, some jostling, some punch­es thrown, but then it calmed down. It was not going to get out of hand.

“Then Mr. Cranston pulled a gun out of his waist­band and shot and killed Mr. Washington.”

Hummel sug­gest­ed that the inci­dent could be part of a dark his­to­ry of Black men being lynched for talk­ing to white women.

“Our coun­try has a dis­grace­ful his­to­ry of den­i­grat­ing, pros­e­cut­ing, and lynch­ing Black men for talk­ing to white women,” Hummel told KTVZ. “Over the last week, lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of peo­ple called and emailed me to remind me of this history.”

But Hummel told KTVZ that there was­n’t enough evi­dence to charge Hummel with a hate crime.

When asked what kind of evi­dence would be need­ed to charge Cranston with a hate crime, Hummel told Insider that “Oregon’s bias-crime law requires proof beyond a rea­son­able doubt that Mr. Cranston’s deci­sion to shoot Barry Washington was based in part on his per­cep­tion of Mr. Washington’s race.”

Cranston’s attor­ney, Kevin Sali, told KTVZ that Washington assault­ed Cranston “with­out provo­ca­tion, result­ing in head injuries that required the police to take Mr. Cranston to the hos­pi­tal, where a brain scan and oth­er pro­ce­dures had to be performed.”

“Indisputable video evi­dence also demon­strates that, in direct con­trast to the dis­trict attor­ney’s pub­lic state­ments, that unpro­voked assault was still active­ly in progress when the sin­gle shot was fired,” Sali said.

Sali’s com­ments indi­cat­ed that he believed his client was jus­ti­fied in shoot­ing Washington, but Hummel said in anoth­er inter­view that he did­n’t think the case cleared the high bar for using a gun in self-defense under Oregon law.

“You can only use dead­ly phys­i­cal force if you or some­one else is about to be killed or about to be seri­ous­ly phys­i­cal­ly injured,” Hummel told Central Oregon Daily. “There is no alle­ga­tion here that Mr. Washington was try­ing to kill any­one, or try­ing to seri­ous­ly phys­i­cal­ly injure any­one. There are alle­ga­tions that there was some push­ing and shov­ing going on, but that does not come any­where near the lev­el that must be shown by some­one before you can legal­ly take a gun out and kill them.”

“If Mr. Cranston thinks that what he did was appro­pri­ate, he’s sad­ly mis­tak­en,” he continued.