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Police identified a man on Monday who shot and killed a California business owner last week after he allegedly took issue with a Pride flag she had displayed at her clothing store in Lake Arrowhead, California.
Travis Ikeguchi, 27, was responsible for shooting Laura Ann Carleton, 66, to death after “yelling many homophobic slurs” about her clothing store’s Pride flag on Friday, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said at a press conference on Monday. Ikeguchi fled Carleton’s store, Mag Pi, by foot and was later killed in “a lethal force encounter” with deputies on Friday.
Officials said that Ikeguchi — a resident of Cedar Glen, California — had a history of making posts that were critical of the LGBTQ community on multiple social media platforms, including X, formerly known as Twitter.
Family members for Carleton could not be immediately reached on Monday evening. However on Sunday, Carleton’s daughters, Ari and Kelsey Carleton, issued a joint statement on Instagram.
“Make no mistake, this was a hate crime,” they wrote. “Her flags had been torn down before and she always responded by putting up a bigger one.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, condemned the shooting on Sunday, calling it “absolutely horrific.”
“This disgusting hate has no place in CA,” Newsom wrote on X.
San Bernardino County Supervisor Dawn Rowe, a Republican lawmaker whose district represents Lake Arrowhead, also denounced Carleton’s killing and vowed to create an environment where LGBTQ people feel safe and respected.
“Regardless of your color, your sexual orientation, your gender, your political party, there should be acceptance, love and tolerance for everybody in this world. And I say that as a white female heterosexual conservative,” Rowe said in a phone call. “This is horrifying to me to think that I would live in a community that could have something like this happen.”
Carleton’s killing prompted an outpouring from celebrities, including actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Kristin Davis, and sparked outrage among national LGBTQ activists.
“No one should feel unsafe or be attacked for who they are or for simply supporting the LGBTQ community,” Sarah Kate Ellis, the chief executive and president of LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, said in a statement on Monday. “Lauri’s murder is the latest example of how anti-LGBTQ hatred hurts everyone, whether they are LGBTQ or not.”
Ellis pointed a recent report by GLAAD and the Anti-Defamation League, which tallied more than 350 anti-LGBTQ hate and extremism incidents in the U.S. from June 2022 to April 2023.
Some of the more recent anti-LGBTQ hate fueled crimes have also similarly involved rainbow Pride flags.
In February, a woman got out of her car and approached a rainbow Pride flag hanging outside a New York City restaurant, setting it on fire. In June, LGBTQ Pride month, a Pride flag was taken down and burned outside of a City Hall building in Tempe, Arizona. Again in New York City, Pride flags were torn down and damaged at least three times outside of the Stonewall Inn — the site of the riots that are credited as the turning point of the modern LGBTQ rights movement — in June.
Carleton’s killing also took place just weeks after the fatal stabbing of a 28-year-old gay man in New York City.
O’Shae Sibley, a professional dancer and choreographer, was stabbed to death July 29 after dancing to music by Beyoncé at a Brooklyn gas station. A 17-year-old male has been arrested in connection with Sibley’s death and charged with murder as a hate crime.
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