PORTLAND, Ore. (PORTLAND TRIBUNE) — Jeremy Christian, the man accused of two murders in the May TriMet attacks, never had a romance, believed in alien visitations and dreamed of moving to South America to become a hemp farmer or live among an aboriginal tribe.
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These observations, among many others, provide the closest thing to an account of the world from Christian’s perspective yet made public. Only a portion of them were discussed in a bail hearing last month. They were recorded by a Seattle psychologist in a psychological evaluation report that was ordered released on Friday in the pending murder case.
And while aspects of the evaluation will likely be challenged or discounted by prosecutors, it provides the strongest hint yet of the sort of defense planned by Christian to avoid a death penalty.
The evaluation depicts Christian’s mental development and social skills as stunted and heavily impaired. Some of the observations that are more relevant to the killings themselves include that at that time, he was “buzzed” on Sangria and had been “smoking marijuana all day,” wrote psychologist Mark Cunningham, in a report prepared for his defense.
The evaluation highlighted aspects of the case that could be used to support a combination mental and self-defense argument as well as other factors that could be used to weigh against the death penalty.
For instance, Cunningham wrote that Christian said his actions in stabbing three passengers came while he was on “autopilot,” propelled by a sense of vulnerability and fear of physical attack — which caused “the triggering of prison survival responses” he’d learned during his earlier eight-year stint behind bars, much of it in solitary confinement.
Cunningham also wrote that in his interviews with Christian, two of his friend and his parents, the psychologist noted no sign that he was a white supremacist. Rather, he said that Christian had become obsessed with the right to free speech, and had developed a habit of saying provocative, offensive things as a way to provide validation and meaning to an otherwise unimpressive life.
Christian told Cunningham he had not even noticed the two girls that have been portrayed as the subjects of his stream of invective that day.
At the time of the killings, Christian was under significant stress because his mother had advised him that he needed to move thousands of comic books into storage, where they would be less safe — causing distress in a “hoarder” personality who was fixated on comic books.
The Portland Tribune is a KOIN 6 News media partner