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The Weirdo-American Community
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At a January hearing in San Mateo, California, a city board ruled that Estrella Benavides had violated municipal code by painting what she said were messages from God in five-foot-tall white letters all over her roof. Starting roughly a year earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the 46-year-old Benavides had covered the entire exterior of her house and car with generally incomprehensible text containing references to Fidel Castro, Hurricane Katrina, rape, Hitler, the Mafia, cloning, and Watergate. She told the board that the messages warned of a global conspiracy to control the minds of the poor via “witchcraft and technology,” but also said they were part of her attempt to regain custody of her young son, who lives nearby with his father.
At a January hearing in a case against a strip club accused of promoting prostitution, private investigator Duane Minard testified that his firm had been hired by the city of San Bernardino, California, to gather evidence at the club but admitted that on one visit he’d gone too far. The 45-year-old Minard told the court that after he paid $300 for lap dances in a private room, the dancer gave him a condom to put on. He knew he wasn’t supposed to accept an offer of sex, he said, but he lost control and soon owed another $500. On his way to an ATM for the extra money (he had to leave his driver’s license at the club) Minard called his boss, who he said wasn’t happy about the situation but assured him the firm would cover his costs. During cross-examination the club’s lawyer suggested that this meant the city would ultimately pay for the sex Minard had; the city’s lead counsel said he hadn’t decided whether to reimburse the $500 but was “inclined not to.”
Police in Lilburn, Georgia, received a complaint late one January night that someone had been screaming and loudly moaning for several hours. Officers followed the sound to the cemetery near Luxomni Baptist Church, where they found ten gravestones had been tipped over. Pinned under one was 24-year-old Ezekiel Dejesus-Rodriguez, in shock with a broken, bleeding leg; he reportedly admitted he’d been vandalizing the cemetery until things went badly wrong.
