Laura Carleton hung a Pride flag outside her California clothing store, Mag.pi. A man fatally shot her after criticizing the flag, the sheriff’s department said.

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.

  • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
    173·
    1 year ago

    They could still hang him, just to be sure! Put his corpse in a rainbow shirt and let him dangle in place of the flag he tore down.

    • Bizarroland@kbin.social
      111·
      1 year ago

      This kind of stuff makes me so angry. Like if I allowed my anger to run rampant and I had the ability to do these things my imagination would cause me to do some of the most horrendous things to this guy.

      Stuff a couple of rainbow colored bad dragons into his orifices, perform srs on his corpse, put him out for free use to any interested necrophiliacs, and then grind up whatever is left of his body after 2 weeks and invite any interested satanists to desecrate and deconsecrate his corpse and consign his soul to Satan and then chunk the pieces into the ocean as fish bait and video the whole thing (keeping the identities of our friendly neighborhood necrophiliacs safe) and post the video to liveleaks.

      Then for safe measure I would troll any sites where people are talking about this and encouraging the actions of the guy and I would hunt them down and do the exact same goddamn thing to them.

      You murdered someone because they had a flag you didn’t like in their fucking window. The fuck.

      You can’t even blame it on your religion because like your religion says “you shall not kill”, it never mentions shit about a fucking flag, so the one good thing about you having the religion assuming this person was religiously motivated at all is that they violated the primary commandment that their God told them not to violate.

      So it’s not like they’re not going to hell when they died anyway.

      Sorry, I’m going to go and like get some therapy or something I’m just unreasonably angry right now. I’m neither trans nor gay I’m just absolutely sick of hatred.