The man who drove his car onto a sidewalk on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and killed a man who was standing just outside a Subway sandwich shop on NE Jarrett last week, has also died. Portland Police say 60-year-old Curtis Palmer died at the hospital on Tuesday.
Palmer drove his Ford Escape SUV about three blocks after hitting 49-year-old DaRon Craig (and nearly hitting Craig’s 12-year-old son), eventually coming to a stop when he slammed his car head-on into other drivers after he jumped a planted center median just north of NE Ainsworth.
According to a story in The Oregonian, Craig was a beloved family man who raised five children of his own and took in three others, “all of whom he treated as his own,” his ex-wife Angeline McKinney-Craig said.
McKinney-Craig has appealed to the community for help after this unfathomable tragedy struck her family. In a GoFundMe post, she said her family is “shattered” and that their son who was with McKinney-Craig when he was struck is “struggling deeply with grief and guilt” as he processes the trauma.
“DaRon was a devoted father who loved all of his children deeply,” McKinney-Craig wrote in the post. “No matter the distance or circumstances, his love for each of them was constant, unconditional, and the core of who he was. His children were his pride, his joy, and the light of his life.” So far the family has raised nearly $25,000.
In an update shared on Tuesday, McKinney-Craig said a fire tore through the family’s home, furthering their loss and taking away many of the memories they had with their late father.
Police haven’t released any further information about what might have caused Palmer to lose control of his car and cause so much damage to this family and the community. Three days after this tragic episode of traffic violence, PPB said there were two more serious injury crashes in northeast Portland — one of them was just 0.6 miles away from where Craig was hit. Both of the crashes on August 10th happened in the very early morning hours, involved drivers that were going too fast for conditions and were suspected of being impaired by drugs and/or alcohol. Later that same day, someone driving a truck on the Morrison Bridge accelerated into the back of a bicycle rider, threw the rider onto the ground and injured them, then sped away. Police are still searching for that driver and I’m working to find out the latest information about the investigation and the condition of the rider.
Thanks for reading.
BikePortland has served this community with independent community journalism since 2005. We rely on subscriptions from readers like you to survive. Your financial support is vital in keeping this valuable resource alive and well.
Please subscribe today to strengthen and expand our work.
Absolutely heartbreaking! So much death for no reason. Still patiently waiting for Black Lives Matter PDX (and really anyone besides BP) to make a statement on the horrid reality of too many people suffering due to bad transportation options and corridors and for being killed for the crime of being outside a vehicle.
https://blackpdx.com/destination/portland/black-lives-matter-pdx/
A lot of other groups are speaking out on this issue. And more people die inside of vehicles than out. Yes — 1000x yes — those who walk and bike are more ‘vulnerable’ to serious injury or death when involved in a crash. But our terrible transportation system does not care what mode you choose. It kills all road users, including those in vehicles. We are being killed – and inadvertently killing others – for the crime of using our transportation system. For the crime of trying to get from point A to B. The safest mode is the bus of MAX
Would you say more about why you feel Black Lives Matter should make a statement. Road safety ttbomk is not their top issue. It’s police violence directed at black men in particular
Sure, its because its in their name. A Black man (in particular) was violently killed through zero fault of his own and his life does not seem to matter. I would have thought a public statement from BLM at the tragic death and how dying because of unsafe streets is still dying would have been in order, but I might have missed it.
Jake9, we know why. Because BLM is not really about that. They’ve been exposed.
It’s so unfortunate that the BLM Global Network organization coopted the name, destroyed its decentralized nature permanently, then made it directly associated with graft in many people’s minds. They have done so much damage to the point that they are indistinguishable from a state asset.
I’d be pleasantly surprised, and who knows?
But I recall much discussion on the Williams and 7th street safety upgrades or fighting freeway expansion as being racist or not being historically sensitive to the black community that was pushed out of the area, so I wouldn’t hold my breath too long for a statement calling for safe streets.
But I know the community is not monolithic, and blm or the ones calling bike lanes racist don’t speak for all black people, so I’m more than happy to see something like that.
I’m struggling to understand why you are singling out this specific Black-led org to make a statement. Care to enlighten us?
I think (I can’t do the research now unfortunately) that more Black lives are lost to vehicular violence than police violence. I thought this might be a chance for a nationally known organization like BLM to throw their weight behind trying to keep Black lives on the violent roadways of America alive. Everyone deserves to go about their business without worrying about being killed. I have a broken rib from sitting in my car in a full stop and being hit randomly by another vehicle. The violence and fear of vehicular violence needs to stop. All and any allies in this struggle are valuable and BLM with its nation reaching voice could be a powerful contributor.
This seems like an obvious troll that intentionally misrepresents the meaning of the name BLM because you think the org is inherently racist or some such reactionary nonsense. But I hope I’m wrong.
This is no more relevant to BLM than when a black person dies of a heart attack. It makes sense that TRANSPORTATION related groups would be saying something about this and not groups who care about racist violence against black people. Sure, in the sense that black people are more likely to be poor, and poverty correlates with being outside of a vehicle (and maybe heart disease), you can get there. Maybe they should say something, maybe that would be a good ally in the fight for better transportation safety, etc. But the question was asked in a way that makes me skeptical that’s what you mean.
I just want to say, I made that comment in haste and I don’t know why jake9 said that. I stand by that it sounds (to me) like it was asked as a gotcha question to randomly discredit BLM, but it could be that it was just a bit of a careless / clumsy question.
That organization has long since discredited themselves. They don’t need jakes help.
This is devastating to read. This happens so frequently. Unexpected for those who suffer directly from this tragedy, but we all expect something similar to happen again soon.
It is harder and harder to understand our complacency, but I wonder if it is, in part, how we experience these horrible losses as a community and how we think about the harm. We count the number of crashes, which makes it seem like it happens one day and then it is over. We divide them into deaths and injuries, which are also discrete temporary events. We can also measure Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYS), which is meaninglful to professionals, and profoundly upsetting, but abstract for most of us.
A more real way to understand the toll this takes maybe to consider the deaths and the people who have to live with the trauma of those deaths. The injuries and then the people who are living with those injuries, sometimes as severe as the initial injury. In addition to deaths, what is the number of people living with the consequences of car-driver caused deaths and injuries.
We have a transportation system that has turned many of us into the walking wounded both physically and emotionally. If you lose a loved one, one day, you don’t get them back the next day, they are gone again and again each day. Likewise, the pain and disability of a severe injury is felt again and again every day.
At some point we shrugged and accepted that this pain was an acceptable burden for us all to bare. I hope there is a counter awakening to true costs, and the understanding that what we are getting from our transportation system is inadequate and not worth that cost. Ultimately I hope we understand that these losses are not the inevitable “cost of doing business.”
Yes! Accepting the constant toll to others as well as accepting the constant toll to ourselves drains more and more of our humanity away and replaces it with something ugly and cold.
My comments on BLM reflect a desire for the violence of vehicle deaths to take center stage for once and give us all a chance to see what that violence has done to us all. By having an organization such as BLM who are known to be against violent deaths come out against vehicular violent deaths would hopefully move the conversation more mainstream and maybe people would be marching in the streets to demand a change in the way the streets are constructed and how cars are too big and to fast and that it shouldn’t be so easy for them to kill us.
The current way of “oh well, thoughts and fingers crossed” simply isn’t working and we need to add more organizations to spread the word that this drumbeat of carnage isn’t acceptable.
Notably zero bicycles involved in these two unrelated incidents.
True but this site could just as easily be called “Vulnerable Road-User Portland” (VRUP), since all road users outside of cars have the same challenges.
Still I like that BP is mainly about bikes since it’s a good focus. Remember how BTA lost support when it became The Street Trust.
This is so very sad. My heart is breaking for this family and his kids. His kids lost a daddy. Because of senseless act. And I hope they catch whoever did this and press all the charges they can on this person. My prayers and thoughts are with the family ex-wife and his kids.