The man saw stars lying on the floor, stunned by the impact of a stranger’s baseball bat.
“This is what you get for disrespecting me,” the victim heard the 53-year-old man say that he had never seen before.
This was just the beginning of a wave of bat attacks lasting several hours, the alleged perpetrator three times proceeded to assault more people while the police sought him out.
Portland police arrested Trendlon Brewer on Wednesday, bringing him up to date after repeated reports that a man had attacked people with a baseball bat. Brewer was charged on nine counts, seven of them crimes.
Brewer has been charged on four different occasions since October, including one for allegedly attacking a man in line with him for food at a homeless shelter, court records show. The charges related to this case were dismissed.
The evening’s events started on Tuesday, when a police officer believes Brewer hit another man’s head with a baseball bat on block 1100 on Northeast Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard. The victim gave police officers a detailed description of the man who had assaulted him, according to a summary of the incident provided by the Portland Police Department on Saturday, but police were unable to find anyone who corresponded.
About an hour and a half later, around midnight, two women were getting off a MAX train at Rosa Parks station when, according to police, the victims told them, Brewer came up to them, muttered something and hit them both, several times, on the back and on the head. The women were left with “severe headaches, back and shoulders”, demanding a trip to the hospital, according to the court records.
Again, the police were unable to find the alleged attacker.
Later that Wednesday morning, several people called the police to say that a man was attacking people with a baseball bat on 500 block from Northeast Everett Street, according to the police department’s summary of events. Northeast Portland, across the river where Brewer was supposed to be the night before. The callers’ descriptions of the man’s clothes and appearance corresponded to what the police heard from the victims of the previous night.
The police were unable to find the attacker or any victims.
Finally, another call came around noon, describing the same thing: a man attacking people with a baseball bat, according to court records. Brewer was carrying a backpack with a baseball bat sticking out of it when the police found it, according to the summary of police events.
The policeman who arrested him needed help from a spectator to take Brewer into custody after Brewer allegedly punched the policeman in the face.
– Fedor Zarkhin