Mark Tschamler, 69, is dead after a violent assault inside his own Portland, Maine, apartment Monday night — and the press is already centering the police shooting that stopped his killer.
This is the pattern. An innocent American is dead, and the institutional reflex is to scrutinize the officers who intervened, not the system that failed to keep a violent man from taking a life. NBC10 Boston's report leads with the suspect shot by police and closes with the attorney general's investigation into the officers' use of force. The dead man gets a clause.
Here's what happened, according to NBC10 Boston: Portland police responded to a disturbance on Colonial Road around 8:16 p.m. Monday. A tenant led officers into the residence, then ran back toward them screaming. Inside, two officers found 41-year-old Brian Oliver of Portland actively assaulting Tschamler. Police say Oliver refused to comply with commands to drop his weapon. Officers shot him. Tschamler died at the scene from the assault. Oliver, now in custody at Maine Medical Center, will be charged with murder.
Police have not disclosed what weapon Oliver used. Both officers were placed on administrative leave — standard practice — and the Maine attorney general's office will investigate the use of deadly force. No further details have been released.
Eight hundred miles west, the same story in a different key. A woman was found lying on the ground with a stab wound to her neck in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood early Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. She was pronounced dead at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Officers searching the area found the suspected attacker on a nearby porch with a cut to his right hand. He was taken to the same hospital in critical condition and placed under arrest. The weapon was recovered. No charges have been announced. The woman has not been identified.
Two cities. Two dead Americans. Two suspects in custody only because police intervened with force. In Portland, the attorney general's office will spend its resources investigating whether officers were justified in stopping a man who was beating a 69-year-old to death. That is where the institutional machinery turns — not toward why Brian Oliver was free to commit murder in that apartment.
The question nobody in power wants to answer is simple: what failed between the last time the system had a chance to stop these men and the moment they took a life? Maine is a state where progressive criminal justice reform has been the bipartisan fashion. Chicago has been the national laboratory for leniency. The bodies keep stacking.
Tschamler is dead. A woman in Englewood is dead. The officers who stopped the killers are on leave or under review. That inversion — the violent held to less account than those who stopped them — is the open wound.
