Portland police are asking for the public’s help in finding a 40-year-old man suspected of attacking another man this month outside a food cart pod in Southeast Portland’s Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood.
Portland detectives are investigating the June 15 attack as a bias crime, police said, and investigators on Thursday named Daniel Thomas Warren as the suspect.
Efforts so far to find and arrest Warren have not been successful, police said.
Investigators are asking anyone who sees Warren to not approach him and instead call 911, and for anyone with information about Warren’s whereabouts to email crimetips@police.portlandoregon.gov.
Darell Preston, 36, was standing on the sidewalk next to his food truck, LoRell’s Chicken Shack, about 7 p.m. in the 3800 block of Southeast 52nd Avenue, when a man attacked him “without warning” while calling him racist slurs, according to Preston’s attorney, Alicia LeDuc Montgomery.
Preston’s wife drove him to a hospital where he was treated for “severe facial injuries,” including bone fractures and lacerations, LeDuc Montgomery said.
Photos of Preston’s face immediately after the attack show one of his eyes leaking blood and completely swollen shut, and the other eye swollen and partially filled with blood.
Preston is still recovering from his injuries and has not yet returned to work, LeDuc Montgomery said Thursday. He and his family are cooperating with the Portland Police Bureau and the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office to “bring the attacker to justice,” she said.
“The (Preston) family deeply appreciates anyone who can come forward with information,” LeDuc Montgomery said.
Portland police are seeking this man, identified as Daniel Thomas Warren, 40, in the attack June 15 on a Southeast Portland food cart operator.
Warren has a criminal record in Oregon stretching back to 2003, with convictions for domestic violence strangulation, assault and burglary, court records show.
Lincoln County sheriff’s deputies most recently arrested Warren Dec. 11 in Yachats after his girlfriend told police he had punched her in the face up to five times and bit her arm. Warren was sentenced Feb. 2 to 180 days in Lincoln County Jail with credit for time served after pleading guilty to a charge of fourth-degree assault constituting domestic violence, according to court records.
Warren wrote in a May 24 letter to Lincoln County Circuit Judge Sheryl Bachart that he had been working on anger management and sobriety while in jail, court records show.
Warren is suspected of attacking Preston less than a month later.
A video of the June 15 assault taken across the street from the food truck appears to show a bald white man punching and kicking a man identified by LeDuc Montgomery as Preston who is crumpled on the sidewalk. The man on the sidewalk appears to struggle to sit up, only to be beaten back down, according to the video, which was reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Passing cars can be heard honking and one driver yells at the attacker to stop, according to the video. The attacker appears to stop beating the man and walks away from the scene with his hands in his pockets.
Detectives started investigating the attack as a bias crime after speaking to Preston’s family on June 18, three days after the attack, police said.
LeDuc Montgomery sent a letter to the City of Portland and the Multnomah County district attorney on Monday notifying them that she was investigating the attack, along with the “timeliness and sufficiency of the government’s response,” according to a copy of a letter reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Officers responded the night of the attack but initially thought they were looking for a pedestrian struck by a car. When they arrived, firefighters who had already arrived told them there had been an assault and that both the attacker and victim had left the area, said police spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Allen.
When officers found Preston at his food truck, he gave them a general description of his attacker. They asked him more details about the assault but he refused to say more, Allen said.
Officers offered to summon paramedics, but Preston declined, according to the Police Bureau.
LeDuc Montgomery said this week her client was too terrified and wounded to talk to officers. “He could hardly speak because his face had been so badly beaten in,” she said.
A GoFundMe for Preston’s family had raised over $63,000 by Thursday afternoon.
— Catalina Gaitán, cgaitan@oregonian.com, @catalingaitan_
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