Adrian Cummins apologized one last time as a Multnomah County deputy snapped a pair of red handcuffs on his wrists.
“Sorry, man,” Cummins said, looking at one of the two teenagers he had stabbed last year on a MAX train.
“It’s OK,” Joshua Morris, now 18, replied from a courtroom bench and waved his right arm in Cummins’ direction.
Cummins, 26, pleaded guilty to four charges for attacking Morris and a friend, who were both 17 at the time. Under a plea deal, Circuit Judge Christopher Marshall sentenced Cummins to 18 years in prison.
The teenagers were on their way to a mall to buy clothes for school last Sept. 2, when Cummins saw them, yelled a racist slur and attacked them both with a knife. The three of them got off at a stop in Lents and Cummins bolted while Morris, who had been nicked on the arm, tried to help his friend, who had been stabbed in the chest.
Police found the two teens at the MAX platform at 9598 S.E. Flavel St. around 5:45 p.m. and took Morris’ friend to Oregon Health & Science University for open heart surgery. He had recovered sufficiently by October to return to school, according to a GoFundMe page for his family. That teenager was not at Monday’s hearing.
Morris’ mother sat next to him in the courtroom as the judge, the prosecutor and Cummins’ defense attorney nailed down the details of the plea agreement.
Cummins delivered an apology as Morris watched him and his mother looked straight ahead toward the judge.
“I’ve been shot in the face, point-blank range. I’ve been in drug addiction. Everything that’s bad out there, I’ve been living in it, while you guys were going to school or buying clothes,” Cummins said. “I’m sorry that my path crossed your path and I did what I did. I was not in my right mind.”
Cummins pleaded guilty to second-degree attempted murder, second-degree assault, first-degree bias crime and first-degree attempted robbery. Cummins is white and the teenagers are Black. He had also been accused of robbing a convenience store clerk at knifepoint that same day, according to court records.
Cummins has a long criminal record, including arrests in Florida dating back to 2014, a three-year prison sentence in Florida for kidnapping, sexual battery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in 2017, and menacing, drug possession and unlawful gun possession arrests in Oregon in 2023.
He had been arrested days before the attack on multiple warrants but wasn’t booked in jail because of concerns that he had an infection that could spread to other inmates.
Cummins’ attorney, Alicia Hercher, attributed Cummins’ attack to drug addiction.
Morris said the attack and the slur Cummins shouted shook him to his “core,” as did seeing blood pour from his friend’s chest.
“You hurt me and my friend that day, not only physically, but mentally as well,” Morris said in his victim’s statement. “That being said, even with all you’ve done — I can’t speak for anybody else that’s in here — but I forgive you. And I hope you can forgive yourself.”
— Fedor Zarkhin is a breaking news and enterprise reporter with a focus on crime. Reach him at 971-373-2905; fzarkhin@oregonian.
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