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.
Resisting this feeling, of hating them beyond human decency like they do to us, is the only thing that makes us better than them. We both fight for what we claim is morality. But the bigots do so with hate, so we must fight with love and empathy - deliver justice to them, but restrain the kind of unbridled, animalistic hate they let free. This is the only way to show that we are better - treating them as human, while they call us subhuman.
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Love and acceptance are not the same. And the hate crimes and genocide are exactly the hate I was referring too.
I’m sorry if I came across as self-righteous or disrespectful - I was simply sharing my opinion, that committing hate crimes against them is no better. Jail time, the death penalty, all that can be justified by their crimes against humanity. But untried murder and rage can never be justified.
And I am a victim of “their shit…” I spent 18 years in a fascist, ultra-conservative household with emotionally abusive bigots for parents. But that’s not the point here.
If they murder and deserve death, it must be delivered justly - with a trial. If we murder them in cold blood because we hate them, even though they are deserving of it, we have shown we are no better about our own execution of justice - just punishment has then become a hate crime.
My point is that we can still fight them with reason, and deliver justice through just means. Trial by the gun is not yet a necessity, and I hope it never is.
But when they have taken over to the point that justice can no longer be delivered - when there is no other way - that is when it must come to war and armed conflict.
No one is advocating committing hate crimes against anybody. You are purposefully strawmanning other people so you can manipulate them into adopting your way of thinking, and I am not gonna let you do it.
You’re a prick.
This clown is motte-and-baileying himself by claiming he meant hate crimes when he was clearly talking about, and says outright, feeling hate in his previous posts.
He was not talking about hate crimes. He was talking about feeling hate and is purposefully conflating the two so he can motte-and-bailey himself out of admitting he is wrong.
That means this guy has an agenda, and is very likely a Nazi apologist.
Everybody do not listen to him or people like him.
I checked a couple of their comments on other stuff, they love Nietzsche and think child labor laws are a bad thing. Yea this person is 100% a Nazi apologist, or maybe just a straight up Nazi pretending to be a centrist
I am not a Nazi apologist like you claim, and I see now that we are clearly beyond the point of reasoning with the intolerant bigots - they must be removed by force as you’re saying. I agree with your points. We’re fighting the same fight, just in different ways - and I never attempted to formulate a strawman fallacy (although your ad hominem is nearly as repulsive). I agree with your method now, I was simply trying to find a way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed where clearly there is no way.
Sorry I made you feel so insulted by my argument as to make those points against me. I concede.
Morality isn’t about being better than others. You are a child. Grow the fuck up
You are still a better person than them if you hate them.
They hate us because of made up bullshit culture wars.
We hate them because they want us and people we care about dead.
These are in no way equal. I hate every single one of these people.
You’re a better person because you hate them if anything
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Nah, we can be better than them and still take joy in bad things happening to them :3
Thanks for the downvotes libs! Stay mad that people don’t like fascists as much as you
Hey! We found a tankie!
That’s true only tankies are allowed to hate Nazis
/s fuck tankies, what the heck kind of take is that? “you hate literal fascists that means you like Stalin” ???
Well, Stalin was a fascist. And Tankies like to call everyone who doesn’t 100% agree with their radical views as fascists and like to throw out “lib” like it’s a slur to anyone they’re arguing with. I’m just making an educated guess here.
Your username certainly checks out