When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled. Whenever someone would tear down the flag, owner Laura Carleton would raise another one.
But after someone complained about the flag on Friday, the encounter turned deadly.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Carleton, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Community members have since rallied around Carleton’s store, placing Pride flags, flowers, candles and photos of Carleton in front of it. Matthew Clevenger of Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ said Carleton was a strong ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“She was a fierce protector of everybody being who they wanted to be,” Clevenger told The Washington Post.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website. After graduating from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Carleton worked at a retail store before joining Kenneth Cole in the 1980s. Carleton worked for the fashion company for more than 15 years as an executive.
In 2013, Carleton founded her clothing store, Mag.pi, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Calif. She added a second store in Cedar Glen in 2021. While she built her career, Carleton married her husband and took pride in their blended family of nine children, her store’s website says.
Carleton was one of the largest donors to Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ and attended the organization’s Pride boat parade in June, Clevenger said. A section of Mag.pi was dedicated to rainbow-colored products, and she displayed rainbow candles by the cash register, he said.
Carleton helped create a culture in which the LGBTQ+ community felt accepted, Clevenger said. But some community members were still resistant, he added, and took down Mag.pi’s Pride flag multiple times.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department. He was holding a handgun when deputies found him on a nearby road, where he later died, officials said.
How many normal people will we allow conservatives to kill before we act? History has shown that an infestation of conservatism cannot be cured by pacifism.
The war conservatves insist on waging against normal people will look exactly like this story. Conservative murders normal person in act of terrorism.
Do your part to train and prepare. You don’t have to be a fighter to help others. Learn to evac wounded and administer trauma first aid. Teach others. Do your part.
There is nothing conservative about radical rightwing authoritarianism. They are fascists.
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Insane Logic
They want to be treated like human beings. Nothing insane about that.
this kinda literally the scene from Boys when the idiot gets brainwashed online to being a hate filled fascist cunt who then walks into a store and killa the cashier because he thinks he is a supe-terrorist
but conservatives absolutely won’t get the metaphor in that shit.
watch conservative shitheads distance themselves from this, fox news will claim they had nothing to with this while pushing thwir hate filled fear mongering shit
The Republican party needs to be forcibly dissolved, or this will keep happening.
Unfortunately, liberals would rather shove their heads in the sand and keep trying to play nice with these fascists.
I believe people have the right to be who they are as long as it isn’t hurting others, but Intolerance should be met with intolerance, nothing less will do.
I have been screaming this for a long time now. As a memeber of the LGBTQ Community, we cannot tolerate the intolerant, even if we are called islamophobic, religiousphobic or whatever. We cannot let these assholes take away our rights. It already started in Italy and it will keep spreading if we keep tolerating these assholes.
What are we supposed to do? Seriously.
Congress is a logjam in both chambers.
The military would split if you tried to force red states to stop being shitty.
Most of our top weapons are in those red states.
So what’s the solution that doesn’t lead to half the country dead?
Plus, on the world stage, a “United” United States protects countries like Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, etc. What happens when we’re gone? China becomes dominant and just starts enslaving people in the lands it takes? The Saudis take over parts of the world and bring their shittiness with them? Russia fucks up more of Eastern Europe?
So what’s the answer here to some really complex questions?
The answer is not to lose the 2024 elections and even exceed what we did before. That starts at the local leveling and volunteering with voters rights groups and getting the youth registered to vote. And we must do this the next election. And the next. Until we can close loop holes to prevent further coups by Republicans.
I am as anti-republican as I can possibly be, but even so I realized that the current MO of the democratic party is not to overthrow the Republicans or stop them from doing horrible shit because they’re profiting immensely from it.
They get so much grassroots support because they are not the bad guys that they don’t even have to try to be the good guys anymore.
With that being said, they have actually done some good and I’m not against the democrats. I’m just not satisfied with their commitment to the cause and I really wish they would step it up, and any Democratic candidate that is closer to my ideal will get my vote over any establishment candidate.
We need to be the change we want to see. Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez weren’t recruited by the Democratic Party. They ran and won as Democrats often much to the chagrin of the National Party. They won’t make it easy. And they will absolutely try to recruit people to run against candidates that don’t play ball with them. But they can still lose no matter how hard they try.
They get so much grassroots support because…
This is your answer. The change we want isn’t going to happen at the federal level only. The DNC has had a really terrible leader up until recently, but even so, they don’t have a good pulse on the left-electorate. They can’t seem to figure out that the country isn’t center anymore.
The reason we didn’t have a “red tsunami” at the midterms, which going on historical trends should have happened, is because of the extremely hard work of grassroots orgs that mobilized the voters on the left (typically low-turnout voting bloc) in local, state, and federal races. And they did all that on a shoestring budget, with little to no help from the DNC.
The change is going to have to be from the local level up. That’s how the GOP got to their “minority rule” status, and it’s how we’ll win back true democracy.
Unfortunately it’s going to take time now to get more desirable candidates. Trump did so much damage to the country that we’ll be undoing it a while.
Contrary to what people believe, the US military has a fairly good cross sectional representation of the American populace. It is most certainly not right wing. I’ve known more than a few active duty military members and actually most were moderate to liberal on the political spectrum. And fairly intelligent.
Yeah, it’s a good cross section, but that still means there are a LOT of neo-Confederates in the military. A new civil war would be devastating.
So like, what happens when one side gets a hold of nukes?
That’s what I’m worried about and why I reject these calls from super-leftists for a new civil war. Do you want NYC, LA, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Portland nuked? Because that’s what happens when the hillbillies in Iowa and the Dakotas get their hands on the nukes that are stored there.
We’ve built the most powerful military the world has ever seen, along with the most powerful single weapon, and guys like the one I initially responded to just want to go ahead and shatter that with a civil war where the neo-Confederates WILL use that against Blue cities.
Heh. One of my favourite pasttimes is TTRPGing, and one of the settings I made to explore my disdain for the hard-right was a setting that featured the destruction of San Francisco by nuclear weapons by Conservatives. I could totally see a ‘Christian States of America’ nuking a liberal city…
Don’t get me hard, the annihilattion of America AND a few degrees off off global warming? I like this.
Honestly, vote. They think they can act like this because of Trump giving them the go ahead.
I’d guarantee you and bet that the military is overwhelmingly in favor of supporting the left should it come to it.
Otherwise, they’d have to admit that they stand against the entire purpose and cause of the military.
I just don’t see that happening. Either I have too much faith in the intelligence of our armed forces, or I’m wrong, but this is how I see it going down.
I agree that most of the military would favor the Union again, but there’s a significant enough amount of neo-Confederates that it would cause BIG problems.
Your country does just as much damage on a global scale as those you’ve mentioned as the bad guys. Please don’t forget that.
Yeah, but I’d generally take our shittiness over Saudi or Russian shittiness. As a note, my family escaped Russia when the Bolsheviks took over, so I’m HIGHLY biased there.
China… I’m not sure about. I studied Chinese history in college, but that was 20 years ago so I kind of stopped paying deep attention around the time of Hu Jintao. Xi seems much more forceful and willing to expand China’s power via dominance and enslavement.
There are no GOOD superpowers, but I think the US is the least bad.
I do kind of agree, but let’s not forget to all our shittiness in Latin America. Here’s a top 10.
Yeah, we screwed up Latin America terribly and are dealing with the consequences now.
Still: I’d take it over the other superpowers.
We have to stop playing within the system
I honestly thought I was on lemmy.ml. I didn’t realize I was amidst liberal redditors, but I’ll spell it out for you.
R E V O L U T I O N
We can’t fix the current system.
And again, what do you do about the consequences of those actions?
Revolution? Do you know where B-2 bombers are based? How about B-52s? Where are most of our young troops sent to train? All three: The South.
You want revolution, but have no plan for it.
Eventually a Thermidorian Reaction will crush the neofascists. Hopefully soon.
Liberals are spineless cowards, we have to fight back. The fascists gave us permission to use deadly force and self-defense the moment they use deadly force against us
So what? You become a one party nation? How about maybe, now this will sound crazy, but fixing the validity of 3rd party parties might help.
First Past the Post voting is an issue that could help make 3rd parties valid.(edit: if we got rid of it)
Until then, a 3rd party is literally fantasy.
Just go to proportional representation, FPTP is crap in otherways. Actually everyone would be chuffed if the electoral collage just went away, the bar is not that high.
You need things spelled out for you? We could form a leftist party since we currently don’t have one, ya dingus.
Yes, that would be a 3rd party.
So the unidentified shooter was a Republican? Quit your BS.
Nothing quite like murdering somebody over the fucking light spectrum.
Not just a light spectrum! A symbol of freedom to be yourself, too. While I certainly agree they don’t like colors, they also definitely don’t like people being comfortable in their own skin
Biblically, it’s also the symbol that God won’t wipe us all off the face of the Earth with another flood.
Rainbows in 1973: Nice album cover, man.
Rainbows in 2023: Won’t somebody think of the children!
Conservatives and being murderers. Goes together like bread and butter.
I’m not saying this to cast doubt on anything, I believe the reason given for the attack, I’m simply curious (probably because I used to be a first responder). One thing I haven’t seen explained in the articles I’ve read about this story is how do we know that he assaulted her for the flag and then shot her? Who called 911? How did they know who the suspect was?
The most plausible explanation to me is she was still alive when the cops got there but died before the paramedics were able to transport her, so she was able to tell them something, since no witnesses were mentioned. Second most plausible is there were witnesses.
Craziest exception to the hearsay rule is the dying declaration.
Wasn’t she killed in her store? Virtually every store these days has security cameras. As for who called 911, guns are loud. Unless you’re in the middle of nowhere, there will be people who hear the gun shot, even if they don’t see what happened.
Yes but I thought I read somewhere that the shooter was confronted soon after (a couple hours?) which would be very fast to find and go through security footage. It doesn’t really matter to me that much, it was just an unknown aspect of a story I am interested in.
“I’m not questioning the reason for the attack but how do we know that’s the reason.”
It’s acceptable to question sources. This story is definitely likely true, but there also plenty of cases of stuff written online(and what police say) being untrue and it’s okay to probe it a little.
I agree, but with the amount of trolling some people do regarding LGBT stuff I wanted to be very clear I’m not one of them. Since every article is stating it as fact and not using “alleged” I assume the journalists know with some certainty, but I haven’t seen it detailed anywhere.
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Sounds like America
In most cases I believe in people getting a fair trial, but in this case I’m glad he was killed by police at the scene. Fuck the piece a of shit.
Why not give hime a life of regret, sitting behind bars for ever, knowing he thrown his life an freedome away because of a flag. Revange isn’t the solution and killing people makes as as bad as them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department.
Law enforcement departments in multiple states, including Maryland, California and New York, have investigated recent instances of Pride flag vandalism as hate crimes.
The original article contains 579 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Imagine being such an immature and incompetent piece of shit that you have to kill someone over a flag.
Speaking of hanging things, I’ve got a suggestion as to what should be done to the murderer…
Is being LGBT political? It’s a sad story but I don’t understand why is posted in the politics community.
She wasn’t LGBTQ+. She engaged in political activism and was murdered, more or less, for that activism.
Thanks for the clarification. Also, why does everyone hate my comment? I didn’t mean to offend anyone, and I support the LGBT movement.
Being LGBT is now political. Politicians are literally debating weather LGBT people should have rights.
…. Because right wing shit bags made it political.
Ban LGBQT books. Ban LGBQT healthcare. Ban drag shows. Ban everything that isn’t white conservative Christian.
And then if they succeed in that then what? Did they win? Do they take their ball and go home? It’s not like the world was all hunky-dory in the fifties. There’s no golden age to go back to.
Then they move on to the next entry in the “then they came for” list.
Okay but at that point only white Christian nationalists are left.
Like what are they going to do take the 18 million people left in America and wage war on the rest of the planet?
They would get annihilated, which now that I think about it is probably the amazing hidden backstory behind Big hero 6. Welcome to San Fran Tokyo
Okay but at that point only white Christian nationalists are left.
Yup, and then they decide to start in on Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Quakers, and Catholics.
Like what are they going to do take the 18 million people left in America and wage war on the rest of the planet?
Probably, yeah. When they have rid the country of those they consider to be undesirable and it hasn’t solved all of society’s problems like they said it would, they can either admit that they committed genocide for no reason or start looking abroad for new monsters to blame shit on and then slay.
They would get annihilated,
Yeah, there’s one little wrinkle in that outlook. Fascism does really short-sighted stupid shit at the end when it gets desperate, and has no regard for human life, and they would have access to the US nuclear arsenal.
The wealthy people pushing this will just find some new novelity, the rest habe no concept of a future.
A lot of countries have historically legislated religion, does that make being religious a political act? I don’t think so. Same with this. Don’t let people co-opt something that you and doesn’t effect others and let them make you a villain or a martyr because of it.
…it shouldn’t be, but has been made so. This article is right where it belongs
Yes, killing someone for hanging a pride flag is a political act.
Supporting LGBT+ people apparently is, along with a bunch of other things I’d consider ‘basic human decency’ thanks to the right wing in this country going absolutely bugfuck the last decade and change.
I was wondering what the defense would come up with.
I can’t think of any links to flags and politics.
Lmfao finding the edge of the political spectrum isn’t as easy as it seems.
