Rush hour on the No. 8

Shiloh Hampton

One of the joys of living in the inner city is that I rarely drive to work. No traffic jams on the freeway for me, thank you very much. Occasionally, though, I'll find myself on an early bus that's packed with riders

Today was one of those days.

Climbing aboard the No. 8 around 8:30 a.m., two other passengers and I squeezed onto an already-full bus and sardined ourselves into a little space right behind the driver, grabbing onto a strap or a pole to avoid falling into someone's lap. Somehow, we took on another handful of passengers between there and downtown, meaning that a good 25-30 people were standing in the aisle on a vehicle that already had about 50-60 folks filling every available seat.

It was a slice of the city's demographics -- teenagers headed to school; a young mom reading a storybook to her daughter; young adults talking on their Bluetooth, texting or listening to music; middle-aged folks buried in their newspaper (yay!) or magazine; senior citizens out for who knows what?

As we passed south of Lloyd Center mall, we paused at a scheduled stop directly across the street from Holladay Park, a nice greenspace with lots of leafy trees between the mall and the light-rail tracks carrying even more commuters to work. At that hour, the park was virtually empty, no sign at all that two days earlier a 14-year-old boy had been critically wounded in what police suspect may have been a gang-related shootiing.

It saddened me to think of this boy named Shiloh Hampton, clinging to life a day after being shot in the head while in the company of friends leaving the mall Monday. The park is roughly half a mile south of where I live. I pass by it frequently on my morning runs. Never have I ever felt unsafe in that area, day or night.

I wondered if any fellow passengers looked out the window and made the same grim connection as me.

It's not the first time I've passed by a notorious landmark on my way in to work. Riding the No. 9 bus into Old Town a year ago, I was keenly aware that we were rolling through the same intersection where a TriMet driver ran over a group of five pedestrians in a crosswalk one night, crushing two of them to death. Wasn't long before a makeshift memorial popped up on the sidewalk -- a sad reminder that I'd see every day for weeks.

As I write this between bites of lunch at my desk, I'm alerted to an update.that just went up on our web site: Shiloh died of his wounds around 8:20 this morning.

No doubt I'll think of him now every time my bus passes that park.