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 Carletonās Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriffās Department. Carleton, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following āa lethal force encounterā with deputies after the shooting, the sheriffās department said in a statement.
Community members have since rallied around Carletonās 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.
āShe was a fierce protector of everybody being who they wanted to be,ā Clevenger told The Washington Post.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her familyās business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.piās 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 storeās website says.
Carleton was one of the largest donors to Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ and attended the organizationās 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.piās Pride flag multiple times.
After making ādisparaging remarksā about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriffās department. He was holding a handgun when deputies found him on a nearby road, where he later died, officials said.
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 theyāre profiting immensely from it.
They get so much grassroots support because they are not the bad guys that they donāt even have to try to be the good guys anymore.
With that being said, they have actually done some good and Iām not against the democrats. Iām 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.
Unfortunately itās going to take time now to get more desirable candidates. Trump did so much damage to the country that weāll be undoing it a while.
This is your answer. The change we want isnāt going to happen at the federal level only. The DNC has had a really terrible leader up until recently, but even so, they donāt have a good pulse on the left-electorate. They canāt seem to figure out that the country isnāt center anymore.
The reason we didnāt have a āred tsunamiā 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. Thatās how the GOP got to their āminority ruleā status, and itās how weāll win back true democracy.
We need to be the change we want to see. Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez werenāt recruited by the Democratic Party. They ran and won as Democrats often much to the chagrin of the National Party. They wonāt make it easy. And they will absolutely try to recruit people to run against candidates that donāt play ball with them. But they can still lose no matter how hard they try.