Portland doctor struck in face by metal bottle in unprovoked attack as she holds city accountable
An Oregon doctor was left bloodied and unconscious when she was randomly attacked and forced to wait over 20 minutes for police on a Portland street on July 28.
Mary Costantino, an Interventional Radiologist, had left a bar around 10:50 p.m with a friend when the unidentified attacker approached the pair and launched an aluminum bottle at the left side of her face, according to surveillance footage.
“It happened really fast, kind of out of nowhere,” Costantino told Fox News. “He just threw an aluminum water bottle and it hit my face. It was hurled pretty hard and it just got me, just knocked me right in the head.”
Costantino couldn’t remember what happened, but knew she was on the ground bleeding and called 911 thinking she was going to die.
“I thought we were still being sort of attacked some way and so I managed to call 911. I was very calm, but I was also very sure I was going to die,” Costantino added. “In my head, I was like ‘I’m gonna try and just verbalize a report of what was happening so there’s some record of how I died.”
She told the outlet she was forced to wait over 20 minutes for police to respond to the area near Southwest 17th Avenue and Southwest Yamhill Street, a neighborhood in the downtown part of the city, several blocks from the Willamette River.
Constantino, who said she wasn’t seriously hurt, sported a black eye, a cut on her nose and a busted lip in photos taken following the attack.
One photo from the sidewalk shows the dazed doctor holding up a couple of napkins to her face as she sits next to a pool of her blood.
She said she didn’t feel much pain at the time of the attack, but knew she was bleeding.
Costantino doesn’t blame the police for any part of the incident but instead wants to hold everyone else liable.
“I do not hold the police accountable for this at all, I hold our city accountable for defunding the police and making it (that) we are in this situation where we don’t have enough police force to protect our citizens, and we did this to ourselves,” Costantino said.
“If we don’t have police officers to come to the side of somebody who is under attack, then we are all on our own.”
Police describe the suspect as a white male in his 20s-30s.
Costantino says she was thankful for her 6’7″ friend that “aggressively yelled” at the attacker who tried approaching her while she was passed out.
The mother of two isn’t too worried about her own safety but fears this could happen to anyone.
“I’m not so concerned for myself, I’m concerned for my friends, I’m concerned for my kids, I’m concerned for everyone walking around downtown,” she said.
“I care about people, I care about every single person in my community, no matter what color flag you wave who you are where you live, and I get angry thinking this could happen to anybody,” Costantino concluded.
There are currently 802 sworn officers in the Portland Police Department serving approximately 641,160 people, nearly 800 residents per one officer, compared to the NYPD’s 33,528 uniformed officers patrolling a city of 8,804,190 or about 262 residents per officer.
Portland has seen a decrease in police staffing over the years, between the rise in crime and the city’s push to “defund the police” following the 2020 death of George Floyd, with 1001 officers on the force in 2019, 199 less than in 2023.
