Generally, I try to stick to the news here. That usually means something that happened within the last 24 hours, though I might sometimes write about something I missed a week ago. This week I came across a story written last December. It’s not really news at this point but I think it’s still really relevant. It’s the story of a murder that took place in Portland. Her name was Rachael Abraham. She’d dated a man named Mohamed Osman Adan. Adan was violent.

The beatings escalated after Rachael and Mo split. He would break in after midnight, the girls sleeping through his punching Rachael, choking her, telling her she was going to die. One night, he put a gun to her head. She was still shaking when the Portland, Oregon, police got there and told her she could request a no-contact order. “When I told him I was leaving him, he told me that he would kill me,” she wrote on the request, which stipulated Mo stay at least 150 feet away from her and the children.

Mo ignored the no-contact order, showing up at dinnertime on June 23. His and Rachael’s 4-year-old let him in. He was very high, whether on cocaine or meth Rachael did not know. He broke her phone and blocked her way as she tried to escape. He spent hours hitting her that night, choking her five times and saying, as he knelt on her windpipe, “I am going to put you to sleep now.” Mo went upstairs to the children’s room. He’d left his phone on the floor. Rachael grabbed it and made for the front door. She was not wearing her abaya when the police arrived. It was 6 a.m., and Rachael had a new black eye as she told officers she believed she was going to die.

Adan was charged with five felonies for the strangulation and then was let out with an ankle monitor. On July 27 he returned to Rachel’s and cut his ankle monitor off. A warrant was issued for his arrest.

At 2 a.m. on Aug. 11, Mo again broke into Rachael’s. A foot taller and 100 pounds heavier, he body-slammed Rachael, sat on her chest, covered her mouth. She could barely breathe but was able to scream, waking the children as Mo swung a length of prayer beads and whipped her face. Then he locked her outside. It was after 3 a.m. when police arrived and arrested Mo again. He was charged with contempt of court for violating the no-contact order.

Sixteen days later Adan was out again and this time he broke into Rachel’s house and murdered her. The coroner later concluded she’d been beaten and stabbed to death.

How could this happen? How could someone so obviously violent and so obviously willing to ignore the court’s demands that he stay away from Rachel. Enter the Portland Freedom Fund:

Portland Freedom Fund had looked into Adan and seen things differently. Or maybe it hadn’t bothered to look. Maybe it considered strangling a woman and holding a gun to her head subjacent to its work as “a volunteer-run abolitionist organization currently dedicated to reducing harms perpetuated against our Black, Brown and Indigenous neighbors by the criminal justice system through posting bail so they may navigate their case from a position of freedom,” as its website stated…

If anyone had walked the walk Portlanders pledged to walk since the killing of George Floyd, and even before, it had been Amanda Trujillo. When Mohamed Adan was up for release on Aug. 20, who’d been there to make bail? Trujillo had been, paying the $2,000 for the charges stemming from June and August and, while she was at it, $3,000 for a suspended license misdemeanor in nearby Clackamas County. The release papers she signed included charges of “contempt violation” and “strangulation,” but who knew if these were accurate? Bail had been set at $20,000, with only 10% security required. Maybe whatever Adan had done wasn’t that bad.

But of course it was that bad. Adan belonged in jail and would have stayed there if not for Trujillo and the people who contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the Portland Freedom Fund. After Rachel’s murder, public opinion on the Fund turned pretty dramatically. All of the group’s social media sites were shut down and Trujillo stopped answer her phone.

But it’s really not fair to blame all of this on one idiot progressive. Because the truth is the Fund was only able to bail Adan out because judges repeatedly refused to hold him and then set bail low enough ($20,000) that it only required a $2,000 check to spring him. If any judge dealing with the case had refused bail or set it at $100,000 Adan would have remained behind bars and Rachel would still be alive.

There is no mass incarceration. There are individual cases involving individual people accused of crimes. Maybe some of those crimes really aren’t worth keeping people behind bars but violent domestic abuse certainly is (or ought to be).

Here’s a report on the case from KGW. This story points out that Portland Freedom Fund spent $200k bailing out a guy who threw a Molotov cocktail at a police officer.