The most extraordinary thing about the confrontation that wrongly sent Ian Cranston, an unassuming young man in glasses, to prison for a decade, is that there was very little argument over the facts because they’re amply documented and were caught on video.
The prosecution admitted that Cranston was assaulted by Barry Washington Jr: a violent criminal who had been harassing his fiancée. The assault by Washington was severe enough that Cranston looks battered in his booking photo, suffered a brain injury, and had to be taken to the hospital for evaluation.
Before Ian Cranston shot Washington in self-defense, the drunken violent criminal had not only attacked him, but also his fiancée, and had punched another of Cranston’s friends in the nose.
The only reason a case that normally should never have even come to trial not only did, but led to an innocent man being locked up for ten years was due to the deadliest three letter acronym.
BLM.
The shooting happened in Oregon in 2021. And BLM rioters quickly emerged. Washington’s family claimed that he was an innocent victim of white racism.
“Does anyone think that Cranston would have even noticed my son if he was not black?” Washington’s mother bafflingly demanded. Most people notice the people punching them in the face regardless of race.
An activist claimed that Washington was “targeted for being a free black man” who “didn’t conform to the racial norms of the 90% white Bend, Oregon.” The norms were embodied by a social media post by Washington stating “if your bf white you single to me. F___ timmy gon do?”
Violating those “norms” led Washington to harass Cranston’s fiancée inside and outside the bar, get into a fight with Cranson, his fiancée and his friends, until finally ‘Timmy’ did something.
Media outlets however described this as Cranston murdering Washington for “complimenting his fiancée”. But Washington wasn’t just hitting on the victim’s fiancée, but he literally hit her, slapping the phone she was using to record his harassment out of her hand.
While prosecutors emphasized that Washington Jr, a California resident, had turned out not to be armed at the time, a year earlier he had been chased by California Highway Patrol officers while driving over 100 miles an hour and throwing bullets out of his car.
When Cranston finally fired one shot at his attacker, Washington had assaulted three people, including him and his fiancée, and despite the victim showing him he was armed, was preparing to attack him again. Afterward, Cranston checked how badly he was shot and tried to put pressure on the wound to save Washington’s life. Not remotely the actions of a racist.
Radical activist prosecutor John Hummel however compared the attacker to Emmett Till.
“Our country has a disgraceful history of denigrating, prosecuting and lynching black men for talking to white women. Over the last week, literally hundreds of people called and emailed me to remind me of this history,” Hummel ranted in a press conference after the shooting “There’s a reckoning with race that needs to happen in Central Oregon, and it needs to happen now.”
Emmett Till had been a 14-year-old boy. Washington Jr was a 22-year-old criminal.
After Cranston asked Washington to stop harassing his fiancée, the attacker reportedly replied,
“F___ you, White boy.” Despite the misinformation from the media and local officials, the only racism in the confrontation was coming from Washington, not from Cranson, who was the victim of Washington’s racism.
But it was time for Central Oregon to have a ‘reckoning’ and that also meant a lynching.
Even though the evidence of what happened was crystal clear, the ideological madness of BLM infected the prosecutor, the judge and the jury, turning what should have been a simple case into a ‘reckoning’ and a ‘crucial moment’ in the twisted civil rights movement of BLM.
That momentary confrontation suddenly represented the entire history of racism in America.
Local officials issued a statement claiming that the self-defense shooting required that “we must dig deep and examine ourselves and the systems and culture”. A memorial was set up, protests were held and media outlets discussed the shooting as a sign Oregon was mired in racism.
Hummel claimed that despite the violent assault, “it was not going to get out of hand” and that the victim had committed “homicide with no justification”. Except for the assault on him, his fiancée and his friend. The prosecution insisted that the only reason Cranston had shot Washington wasn’t to defend himself, his fiancée and his friends, but out of “pride”.
The pro-crime DA had become notorious for viciously attacking law enforcement, announcing after the drug overdose death of George Floyd, a career criminal, that he would no longer accept donations from police officers, declared that he had “a full appreciation of the privileges that were bestowed on me at birth, as a white, male, American, born into a family of means” and that it was his mission, not to enforce the law without fear or favor, but “to be an ally to people of color”. That meant choosing to be an ally to the perpetrator, not the victim because of his race.
“The question I have to decide is whether Cranston’s decision to shoot was motivated in part by [Washington’s] race,” Hummel claimed, even though there was no evidence of any such thing.
The same DA who had rushed to stop prosecuting cases involving hard drugs, did everything he could to throw the book at a victim of racial violence, while accusing the victim of racism.
Hummel’s radical leftist allies, the ‘Central Oregon Peacekeepers’, a group some have linked to Antifa, had targeted Cranston. Hummel had sided with the hate group during its radical confrontations with law enforcement and relied on it in Cranston’s lynching.
“I’m going to tell you this: Some people in this community criticize a group in town called the Central Oregon Peacekeepers,” the pro-crime DA reportedly said. “I think highly of them. They gave me evidence that I shared with the Bend Police Department about this case that we didn’t know when we gave it to them. I give them kudos, I thank you.”
The group Hummel was relying on, which some describe as Antifa, had been accused of threatening news organizations and warning them not to broadcast evidence of Washington’s violent racist assault on the young couple. The video was crucial because it completely disproved the false narrative that Cranston had violently lashed out over an innocent compliment.
The prosecution argued that the 26-second delay between when Cranston displayed his weapon to warn Washington off and the shot he fired proved that he wasn’t in any danger. They tried to suppress evidence of Washington’s violent history including the California incident.
But Washington was continuing to lunge at the smaller man despite his weapon and a normal person with no combat experience might freeze up, hesitate and delay before finally firing.
Jurors, under pressure to show they weren’t racist, convicted Cranston of First Degree Manslaughter, a charge that was clearly not warranted because the victim had only fired once in self-defense, and a police officer on the scene testified that he then tried to save his attacker’s life.
And so the victim of a violent racist assault was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Four years later, the tainted trial has now been reversed by the Oregon Court of Appeals. It doesn’t end Cranston’s ordeal but it will lead to a new trial. Current DA Steve Gunnels has warned that he intends to continue trying Cranston for defending himself against Washington.
Still Cranston may have another day in court in a country where Floyd fever has died down.
Meanwhile, Bend has unveiled a plaque ‘memorializing’ Cranston’s attacker. The placement of the permanent plaque near where Washington was shot while attacking Cranston and his fiancée was attended by local officials who doubled down on efforts to turn the attacker into Emmett Till and George Floyd. The plaque falsely claims that Washington “was well liked by everyone he met”. If Washington were liked, he wouldn’t have assaulted Cranston and would still be alive.
Washington lost his life while attacking a stranger, Cranston lost his freedom for defending himself. Washington’s crime was individual, but the crime committed against Cranston was not the act of any one man, but of a corrupt system that put racial grievance ahead of the law.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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