Half of a 78-year-old man's face was chewed off in a gruesome attack at a train station in Portland, Oregon, according to local ABC affiliate KATU.
Koryn Kraemer, 25, is accused of attacking the man around 2:15 a.m. Tuesday at the Cleveland Transit Station in the suburb of Gresham, allegedly biting him with such force that police reported seeing the elderly man's skull. Law enforcement officers arriving on the scene said they found Kraemer still on top of the man and discovered he had "chewed off the victim's ear and part of his face."
Investigators are in the process of determining if drugs played a role; KATU reports that Kraemer allegedly admitted to using alcohol, marijuana, and fentanyl before the attack.
Commuters told the news outlet that they're used to carrying weapons or pepper spray for protection, but are becoming increasingly worried after hearing about episodes of violent crime at transit stations.
"It's scary," commuter Julie Anderson said. "It's just getting really, really scary. I ride the MAX all the time and it's so convenient, but when you hear scary stories like that it makes me try to be even more aware I think, if anything."
The shocking attack comes amid a new homicide record for Portland for 2022, with 100 homicides as of Dec. 29, according to The Washington Free Beacon. From 2019 to 2021, the Democrat-run city experienced a 207% increase in the homicide rate, surpassing San Francisco, Atlanta, and Minneapolis, which have all also seen rising crime rates in recent years.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, has come under fire for being soft on crime. In April, Brown granted clemency to a man who fatally shot a teenage girl and failed to notify the victim's family. She also commuted all death sentences in Oregon in December, eliciting outrage from the families of the victims.
"I'm horrified and outraged and I don't know what this means," Sue Shirley, whose parents were murdered in 1988, told the Free Beacon. "All I know is that we never get to have a say."
Between February and December of last year, Multnomah County, of which Portland is the county seat, dismissed 300 criminal cases, with a total of 2,500 felony cases impacted by delays or dismissals for lack of available defenders.
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