An Oregon machinist with an ugly history of right-wing anger and harassment has been identified as the man who allegedly opened fire near a protest over the weekend in Portland, Oregon, leaving one woman dead and several others injured.
Portland police formally named Benjamin Jeffrey Smith as a suspect in the mass shooting that killed 60-year-old June Knightly, a volunteer with a traffic crew for the protest, and critically injured at least two others. In a news release Tuesday, police said Smith remained hospitalized in serious condition and that detectives were working with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office to determine potential charges.
Smith’s roommate Kristine Christenson told The Oregonian that Smith had appeared on Reddit under the username “Polybun.” That account made anti-Semitic comments and praised Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who fatally shot two men and wounded another during a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020.
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Rittenhouse, of course, got off with no prison time after a jury acquitted him of murder in November.
“He has been getting more and more radicalized as the years went by,” Christenson told the paper. “He went from ‘FU police’ to ‘Blue Lives Matter’ in the last year.”
A review by The Daily Beast of a trail of social media posts showed accounts with that name on Reddit, YouTube, and various online forums that were linked by an interest in classic cars, furry culture, the group MC Virgins, and the annual Burning Man festival. The Redditor using that account participated in r/Portland discussions and mentioned a childhood in rural Indiana, matching Smith’s own life trajectory, according to public records. (Furry culture is traditionally neither violent nor extremist, but has had its share of far-right interlocutors; Polybun maintained a surly online persona, clashing frequently with others.)
Records also show that Smith faced assault and harassment charges in August 2010. While the assault charge was later dismissed, he was ordered to serve two years bench probation, have no contact with the alleged victim and to submit to anger counseling, court documents show.
Christenson, who lived with Smith for seven years before the incident, told The Oregonian that Smith “made me uncomfortable,” and that he kept at least four guns in his room.
She said that Smith often bashed the Black Lives Matter movement and complained about COVID-19 mask requirements and neighborhood crime, the paper added.
“He’s been upset at so much,” Christenson said.
In one log from a forum entitled “Free Fur All 2022 Unofficial Chat” Polybun also appeared to praise the far-right Proud Boys.
“If proud boys shot up somebodies [sic] car they probably deserved it,” he wrote. “Thus far they sadly haven’t shot up someones car, because good christ that needs to happen.”
Minutes later, he wrote that while he believed all socialists suck, “if you make me choose one socialist or the other, I’m taking nazis over Antifa.”
He also appeared to defend Kyle Rittenhouse, writing: “Throwing Kyle under the bus after all thier [sic] talk was not only a dick move but flat out wrong. And it’s painfully obvious why... Company owned by Jews won’t support the kid that defended himself from Jews.”
The rhetoric of hate was evident years before, when, in a comment on Reddit in Nov. 2017, the poster said hatred was a kind of motivator.
“Hate is all that keeps me going most days,” he wrote, adding that he was driven by “the desire to get out of bed and tell the world ‘fuck your day.’”
“I reject the notion that love is the only answer,” he continued.
Smith’s brother, Arthur Killion, told The Oregonian that the 43-year-old had grown increasingly angry about protests in Portland, where racial-justice demonstrations and other activism have shaped local life in recent years. Those sentiments were echoed by Christenson and neighbors, who told the outlet that Smith was both outraged by protests and upset by homeless people who he claimed were digging through trash bins at his apartment complex and sheltering at local parks.
Those neighbors also said Smith both repaired and collected guns he would sometimes show off, the paper reported.
One neighbor, Polly Kuprienko, told the outlet she saw her neighbor exit his apartment wielding a gun and threatening a homeless man who was fishing around in the building’s trash bins.
Before Smith was formally identified in the investigation, police had described the fatal incident as a dispute between an armed neighbor and a group of demonstrators. Protesters over the weekend demanded accountability over the killings of two Black men by cops: Patrick Kimmons in Portland in 2018 and Amir Locke in Minneapolis earlier this month.
Smith’s brother told The Oregonian that he had “multiple issues” and hostility toward Portland activists, and that his brother told him he was saving money to move out of the city back to Indiana or to Tennessee after two decades in Oregon.
“He said they had threatened him and others personally in the past. He said he was ready to defend himself,” Killion told the outlet.
“He had no love for them,” Killion added, before defending his sibling. “But he’s not some right-wing nutjob. He’s a master machinist.”
As for Knightly, friends previously told The Daily Beast that before she died, she worked at finding common ground in activism, was involved in the LGBTQ community, and was dedicated to fighting for racial justice.
Meanwhile, according to Christenson, Smith “seemed fine” when he first let her move into the apartment seven years ago and allowed her to stay there for free.
“As the years went on, he’s just gotten more and more radicalized. He got angrier and angrier,” Christenson told OPB. “I have not been comfortable living with him for a while. I did not feel safe with him, especially this last two years with the whole COVID thing. I think that made him even more angry.”
