Portland's Westboro Baptists
Who are progressives going to call when an infidel crashes their party?
You won’t find any art dedicated to the terrifying last hour of life for Bridget Camber and Ian Dahl at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s “Policing Justice” exhibit.
The young couple weren’t killed by cops. The man who killed them — Sterling Cunio —was invited to the art show to speak at a symposium called “Policing in Portland: A Community Conversation.”
Cunio was in safe territory. Many of the other speakers were familiar social justice activists in the Portland area — former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, city council candidate Candace Avalos, Lewis & Clark history professor Elliott Young. And Portland is home to Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt — a progressive prosecutor who has lent his name to the cause of ending mass incarceration.
Cunio’s bio box in the program at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) said nothing about the two life sentences he received for aggravated murder, kidnapping and robbery. Instead, his bio offered this reassuring language:
Sterling Cunio, is an award winning author, playwright and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book review and performed by various artist including Grammy award winning musician Antino Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon's Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon's constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and planet through joy, art and sustainability.
What he left out is that on Jan. 15, 1994 — a month before he turned 17 — Cunio and 18-year-old Wilford Hill kidnapped, robbed and murdered Bridget Camber, 18, and her fiancé, Ian Dahl, 21.
The couple were kissing goodnight in the parking lot of Dahl’s apartment complex when Cunio and Hill took them at gunpoint. They forced Camber into the passenger seat of her car and Dahl into the back seat. With Cunio driving, they headed to a rural area outside Albany. On the drive, they ordered Camber and Dahl to hand over their wallets, jewelry and other personal items. When they arrived near Hyak Park, Cunio and Hill tied them up, forced them into a ditch and shot them.
On the drive back to Dahl’s apartment to see what else they could steal, Cunio and his buddy laughed: “Did you see how they jumped?”(For more details, see “Crime, Punishment and Fellowships.”)
While Cunio, 46, didn’t include this criminal history in his bio box, he alluded to his lived experience that gave him credibility to speak on policing and “Reimagining Community Safety.”
The last time I encountered Cunio was at the Democratic Party victory celebration on Election Night 2022 — another friendly audience he addressed. It says something that the Democratic Party leadership gave him a prominent platform. Perhaps they liked his dreadlocks. (He called himself white and biracial when he was arrested. He now embraces his blackness.)
At the PICA symposium, I decided that if I had a chance to ask Cunio a question I would reprise one I put to former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
He was in Portland three months ago to help cheer on Schmidt’s re-election bid and celebrate the premiere of the film “Beyond Bars: A Movement, Not a Moment” about his parents, who were sent to prison for their participation in a Brink’s robbery that left a security guard and two police officers dead. The film barely acknowledged the deceased men.
“Can you say their names?” I asked Boudin.
The question is from a popular chant that Don’t Shoot PDX uses at protests to draw attention to the victims of officer-involved shootings: “Say their names!”
So during the audience Q-and-A at PICA, I stood up in an audience of about 80 people, spoke into a microphone and asked Cunio: “Could you say the names of the young man and woman you murdered so you could steal their car?”
The audience booed. They groaned and hissed.
This was more “community conversation” than the moderator, Amber Boydston, could handle. She describes herself as a social justice facilitator, police abolitionist, business decolonizer, educator (elementary through higher ed), who uses deep breathing and meditation to support “the journey of Liberation across the Global Majority diaspora.”
After my question, though, it appeared she forgot how to breathe deeply. This was not a conversation she wanted to facilitate. She wanted to shut it down.
Cunio, without using a microphone, quietly uttered the names of Bridget Camber and Ian Dahl.
He later described the crime as a “carjacking.” It was much more than that. Had he raped Camber (imagine what was going through her mind on the 22-mile drive to what would be her execution), Cunio’s criminal history might not have been so acceptable to the PICA audience.
Rape, because of its feminist connections, is still regarded as a serious crime. That’s how progressives swing. Their ethics are so malleable, they can denounce a sex crime but embrace an aggravated murderer.
I sat down after asking my question, and five slender, short-haired, white millennials in the row in front of me, who looked like they could have come from the same litter, turned around and insisted I leave.
“Call 9-1-1,” I replied.
Portland’s social justice progressives bring a religious fervor to their politics. This crowd reminded me of the ultra-fundamentalist Westboro Baptists I dealt with when I worked as an editor at the daily newspaper in Spokane, Wash. The Westboro Baptists liked to fax and email “press releases” denouncing homosexuals, Jews, Muslims and U.S. servicemen.
A couple of times I tried to engage them in conversation to understand why they believed what they believed. Westboro Baptists and Portland’s social justice progressives are equally intolerant.
For the remainder of PICA’s symposium, the panelists made reference to the infidel in their midst and her rude question. They lavished many words of praise on Cunio.
“Thank you for the love,” he said at one point.
Cunio wants absolution without contrition. He would be more deserving of respect if he were honest about how he became the man he is today: He served a 28-year prison sentence. He couldn’t bullshit his way out of incarceration. He had to actually change.
Even he acknowledged, “At age 26 I realized I had done nothing good in the last 14 years.”
It took him the first nine years in prison to simply understand that. Only then did he start to transform himself.
Now that he is free, Cunio works as an advocate for more lenient sentencing. He has a tendency to portray himself as a victim. He likes to recall that at the time he was sentenced for aggravated murder, kidnapping and robbery, he was just a “whisker less kid,” as if he were harmless.
He likes to say he was sent off “to prison” at age 17. Not true. At that age, he went to the Oregon Youth Authority. He didn’t enter prison until he was an adult.
Ten months after Camber and Dahl were murdered, Oregon voters passed Measure 11 to get tougher with violent criminals like Cunio. It didn’t take long for politicians to start finding ways to get around Measure 11.
In 2019 came a big move. The Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 1008 overturning portions of Measure 11 so it would be easier for violent teenagers — including murderers — to catch an early second chance.
Cunio advocated for the change and was frustrated that it wasn’t retroactive to help him. Instead, he scored an early release courtesy of Gov. Kate Brown (D) when she handed out a record number of clemencies before she left office — hundreds more than all other Oregon governors combined.
Had Cunio kidnapped and murdered two people in today’s Oregon, he could have been free by age 25. Would he be the man he is today had he been cut loose so early? What would it say about the value of Bridget Camber’s and Ian Dahl’s lives? It’s hard to see how diminishing the lives of murder victims would contribute to community safety.
Even more chilling, had young Cunio murdered two people today, his name might not be public. In Juvenile Court, the proceedings could be closed to public scrutiny — for the benefit of the “child” who did the killing.
Next time Cunio has a bunch of true believers in the palm of his hand, he should lay some brutal truth on them:
“You would not have wanted to be at the mercy of me when I was a whisker-less kid, one month shy of 17. I was vicious. I loved to cause pain. It felt good.
“Here’s the really bad news. There are more out there just like I once was. What are you going to do? Feel sorry for them? Send them to something that resembles day care instead of incarceration? We have a lot of freedoms in this country. There are people who will take advantage of those freedoms to harm others. Unless you are willing to restrain the freedoms of people who prey on others, the rest of us are at their mercy.”
It would also be nice if Cunio could offer thanks to the taxpayers of Oregon for paying for his numerous appeals, which began shortly after he was sentenced.
At PICA, Cunio resorted to legal hair-splitting, citing various court cases and decisions — as if the murders of Camber and Dahl were just footnotes. Even an audience member dismissed their deaths as something that happened years ago.
With enough passage of time, the same will be said about Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best — two white men killed on a MAX train by a “white supremacist” named Jeremy Christian.
Or the same disregard will eventually be visited upon June Knightly, a 60-year-old woman who liked to participate in traffic-stopping protests near Normandale Park and was shot to death by Benjamin J. Smith.
The PICA audience members who rushed to the defense of Cunio probably support the concept of de-incarceration or ending mass incarceration. They probably supported much of the Democratic-led criminal justice reforms of the past decade, which have benefited criminals.
How will they feel if those reforms benefit someone who kills one of their friends? How will they feel if Smith, sentenced to 55 years for killing Knightly, is released early because of infirmity or compassionate release?
It could happen. In the Oregon legislative session that just ended, Senate Bill 1560 would have made it easier for prison inmates who are ailing to apply for “compassionate release.” Nobody testified against it in committee. It didn’t make it to a full vote because of the short session. A similar bill is expected to be back next year during the long session.
The symposium ended with a poem by Cunio called “Ubuntu.” It has something to do with climate change and reuniting people through joy, art and sustainability.
He received a standing ovation — minus the infidel and a couple of other folks.
[While we're at it let's give Idaho resident Skylar Meade and his group a standing ovation. Such a fine endorsement for the Greater Idaho annexation movement. Or for anyone considering a move to Idaho.]
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