CBC News's interview requests were not answered, but we received an email response from Canadian Tire. Cappo directly, and we hope to resolve this matter as quickly as possible. As of Thursday evening, Cappo said he had given his phone number to someone who messaged him on behalf of the company, but has not received a call.
Brandy Maxie said she saw the post online Wednesday, and showed up to the store Thursday in order to "shame" the business. Maxie said anyone who has watched the videos and doesn't believe the altercation has to do with racism is simply wrong. Bob Hughes, an advocate and spokesperson for the Saskatchewan Coalition Against Racism, said it's all too common for First Nations people in the city to be followed and confronted by store staff.
I'm not leaving the store, they have no reason to kick me out of the store,'" said Hughes. On Thursday, Regina police were called to the Canadian Tire after someone phoned the store and threatened it with a gun.
No citations were issued. Bieber was accused of allegedly punching a fan in Barcelona in November Video of the incident appeared to show the singer's hand making contact with the young man's face which was bloodied after the fan leaned into Bieber's vehicle.
Bieber was found guilty in June of assault and careless driving, according to an Ontario court clerk. The charges stemmed from an August incident in which Bieber was arrested after his ATV collided with a minivan. In January , Bieber was charged with driving under the influence in Miami, a case he settled in August by pleading guilty to careless driving and resisting arrest.
And he is on probation for a vandalism conviction that resulted from egging a neighbor's home. Summer was anything but relaxing for Bieber. In June, the pop star was plagued by the emergence of videos of himself as a young teen using racially offensive language.
Then, in July, his neighbors complained to police that his house parties were inordinately noisy. Add the ATV accident in Ontario in August, and to round out his summer, there was a rumor that Bieber had gotten into an altercation with actor Orlando Bloom. If there was a bright spot in the summer of , it came in June when Bieber was cleared in an attempted robbery case.
A woman had accused the singer in May of trying to steal her cellphone, but the Los Angeles city attorney decided there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute the singer.
In April, Bieber's antics prompted an online petition to have him deported from the country. The petition was hosted on the White House's website and received more than , signatures. Video of Bieber being a hostile witness during a deposition the month before likely didn't help sway the petitioners' perception of him as "dangerous and reckless. Customs and Border Protection officers searched Bieber's private airplane -- thought to be the one pictured -- January 31, , at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
Officers said they detected an odor of what seemed like marijuana after the plane landed, law enforcement sources told CNN. Drug-sniffing dogs were used to search the plane, according to one of the sources, but no sign of drugs were detected and no illegal substances were found.
The investigation was closed in July. Bieber turned himself in at a Toronto police station on January 29, , facing an assault charge stemming from an encounter with a limousine driver in December. But the charge was dropped in September after prosecutors decided there was "no reasonable prospect" of convicting Bieber of striking his limo driver on the back of his head, said Brendan Crawley, a spokesman for the Ontario attorney general's office.
Bieber, seen here with model Chantel Jeffries the night before his arrest, eventually pleaded guilty of careless driving and resisting arrest. On January 14, , authorities swarmed Bieber's mansion in Calabasas, California, in connection with an investigation into a report of an egg-throwing incident at a neighbor's house.
As part of a plea deal, Bieber was sentenced to two years' probation. Trucks stacked high with logs still rumble down the main street, but not as in the old days. Much of the forest can no longer be logged. In the '90s, the Clinton administration protected old-growth trees in the name of the threatened spotted owl, and changing global markets further depleted the industry.
Today, Twilight -themed gift shops, java drive-thrus, and Tesla charging ports signal a newer tourist economy. The influx of visitors, however, hasn't replaced the jobs lost from logging, and disdain for government meddling is as common as American flags.
Trump won 60 percent of the Forks vote in One of the bigger local logging companies made branded Trump baseball caps, a symbol of both national triumph and Left Coast dissent. People call this part of the Olympic Peninsula the West End.
A half-hour drive from the Pacific Ocean, Forks is one of the rainiest towns in the continental United States and one of the more isolated. This separateness breeds a sense of mutual reliance within the community. When the day comes that the Cascadia fault running the length of the Pacific Northwest coast ruptures, help might not arrive in Forks for a month, so a network of residents keep ham radios at the ready to coordinate survival logistics.
The town's seclusion also warded off Covid There were only two cases before late July, one assumed to be related to tourism, and many resented the outsiders potentially harboring the virus who continued to trek to the peninsula. The A Road falls into the Clallam County sheriff's turf, and in the days after the townspeople followed the bus into the woods, detectives fanned out to conduct interviews. The crime they were investigating was cutting trees on federal land, a misdemeanor. But they also wanted to learn more about the pursuers' intent, which could push the charges into disorderly conduct, malicious mischief, harassment, or, if race were involved, a hate crime.
Once the identity of Big Bertha's inhabitants and their innocent intentions were made public, many of the get-out-of-town posts were deleted from social media, but now residents, troubled by their neighbors' actions, had screenshots in hand. They wanted to share the information and for the perpetrators to be caught, but they also wanted to be able to eat at Pacific Pizza without being hassled or shunned.
So some fed images to Matthew Randazzo, a journalist and former Democratic Party county chair. Randazzo, in turn, set about lassoing Twitter outrage toward ForksGoons with a thread of screenshots and commentary to ensure that authorities couldn't even think about letting it go. The Chamber of Commerce denounced the incident.
At a city council meeting the following week, Mayor Fletcher read an apology to the family. While some of Forks' old-timers didn't appreciate outsiders complaining on the town's Facebook groups, they too were outraged by the actions on the A Road. They both drive school buses and are partial to Day-Glo manicures and rhinestone-dusted baseball caps and caroling down the school halls at Christmas.
She says she's more Republican than not; Tami isn't political. Both were appalled by local men questioning visitors as if they had a right to. They thought about how frightened the family must have felt, with men pursuing them while carrying guns. Nothing about that is OK. The sisters got in a spat with one of the guys who'd been in the Thriftway lot, first on Facebook, then on the phone.
The sisters hope for justice. By midsummer, the sheriff's investigators had talked to around 40 people, homing in on 10 they believed were at or near the tree-felling.
But they couldn't get closer: Who cut the trees? Who fired a gun? Investigators' phone calls went unreturned. National media had picked up on the story, and witnesses who did cooperate told investigators they were intimidated by the attention.
Friends told friends they didn't want to know names, so they wouldn't have anything to snitch. Clallam County chief criminal deputy Brian King lives in the county seat of Port Angeles, but he graduated from Forks High School, where his wife now works.
His team resorted to plan B. People had used social media to broadcast the bus stalking. Maybe they'd used it to coordinate too. If they wouldn't speak, maybe their digital trail would. Investigators served search warrants to Verizon for cell phone records and to Facebook for the activity of those people at or near the tree-felling.
Internet disinformation often seems disembodied, its actors faceless, its path through hearts and minds hard to see. In Clallam County, the consequences were tangible, the players visible, and I knew where to start.
Tami Bagby Shaner and Teri Bagby Gaydeski are fourth-generation Forks residents who were appalled when their neighbors not only failed to welcome strangers but harassed and pursued them. Freds Guns, on Highway , sits on the outskirts of Sequim. The mayor is a hair stylist and avid motorcyclist who attended the notoriously un-distanced Sturgis biker rally in South Dakota. He espouses the QAnon conspiracy theory on his personal Facebook page and in mayoral interviews.
When I visited Sequim, an older white man in suspenders sat on a corner downtown displaying a Black Lives Matter poster, gently waving to drivers. Many whooped in support. Courtney Thomas grew up in Sequim, her family having farmed and logged in the area for more than a century.
Thomas, 33, is a massage therapist and the white mother of three adopted kids, one of them Latino. When Black Lives Matter protests sprouted across the country after George Floyd's death, and then two Black students in Atlanta were tased and pulled from their car, she posted a call for the June 3 march on Facebook and was thrilled when hundreds showed up.
Then marchers showed her Seth Larson's Facebook video calling on his buddies with guns. Families at the protest—hers included—whisked their kids away. Some armed men started arriving. Thomas talked to a man wearing a bulletproof vest who'd come with two German shepherds. You're here to look scary. Larson had ignored the message I'd sent, but once I showed up at the store he agreed to talk, somewhat warily. He wears a belt sporting tools to handle all manner of potential emergencies: a tourniquet in case someone gets shot, handcuffs to make a citizen's arrest, a Glock pistol, and an extra magazine.
He didn't wear a face mask. Taking my station in front of the camera, I asked Larson why he had raised the alarm. I love this county. I love this town. Honestly, the Black Lives Matter group is really good at making you look like a racist.
Hey, just because you're Black, it doesn't mean you're more special than me. We're all created equal, 'kay? After the Sequim police confirmed that no antifa were at the march, the police chief, Sheri Crain, who has known Larson since high school, asked him to delete his video. He did. So I was surprised to hear him revert to his earlier position. His evidence was that he recognized only 30 to 40 protesters.
He then suggested that small-town cops wouldn't know how to identify antifa anyway. In his Facebook Live video of the protest, Larson walks up to a parked black van in which a middle-aged white man is holding a camera. Larson told me that the only reason the antifa activists lurking at the march didn't act out was because the presence of his friends deterred them.
Sequim police counted roughly a dozen of Larson's followers, several with pistols holstered on their hips. As Larson recalled this scene to me, an elderly white customer in a US Army cap rolled up in an electric wheelchair, listening with interest. He asked whether this Three Percenter group had regular meetings and if there was some information he could read about it.
It's just people that are Americans and they're for the Constitution and they're veterans and retired law enforcement people.
Larson said he hadn't heard that, but, in any case, he couldn't trust Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and therefore couldn't trust what Twitter said. He added that even if the tweet was false at the time, it had become true, because now protesters were invading small towns.
He gestured to his latest Facebook post on his monitor, a news story about Black Lives Matter protesters at the Seattle police chief's house in rural Washington.
Though he still seemed feisty about antifa, Larson told me that the dustup had worn on him. He said he received online threats after posting his video of the march, and he had moved his family out of their home shortly after.
He knew about the debacle on the A Road but rejected the notion that his posts had set it in motion. Larson then turned to the matter of the bus itself.
There were seven grown men on the bus. Leaving Sequim, I drove west on Highway , the same direction misinformation had traveled on June 3, when rumors spread from a white-supremacist tweet to Seth Larson's Facebook page and out through the social media accounts of Forks residents.
Rioters will be shot. I'd arranged to meet Breedlove in a gravel lot just past the Forks welcome sign. He was waiting in a Toyota truck, and I hopped aboard for a tour of the nearby mountains.
A necklace hanging from his rearview mirror swung side to side like a metronome as he sped over back roads. Breedlove is 56, and for some 25 of those years he logged these ridges. An explosion in a logging shop when he was a teen blasted off the ends of his right fingers, and a machinery accident took off three on his left. In his mid-forties, Breedlove turned to the security and pension of a job at Clallam Bay Corrections Center, one of two nearby state prisons.
In an inmate beat him on the head with a metal stool. He's been on disability ever since. The assault caused traumatic brain injury, and at first Breedlove had trouble speaking. He would stumble while walking. Going out was difficult, but he could connect online. That was the only place I felt comfortable. After bucking down an old mud logging path to show me a swimming hole, Breedlove turned his Toyota toward the scene of the A Road bridge standoff.
We hopped out and walked over to inspect the freshly shorn alder stumps. The cut branches were still piled nearby. Breedlove never saw the bus, and when I talked to him on the phone a few weeks before coming to Forks, he downplayed the A Road incident, given that no one had been hurt.
But now he was of the mind that things had gone too far. What were you doing? Back in the pickup, we bounced up Hunger Mountain, and I asked Breedlove if he regretted putting up the antifa posts. A couple of days after the A Road fiasco, Breedlove heard about a Black Lives Matter protest happening in Forks, organized by four young white and Native American locals. Breedlove had only seen the protests filtered through the news and social media, and now that one was happening in his town he decided to see it with his own eyes, maybe talk to some people.
Two hundred protesters showed up along the town's main street, at one point lying down on the sidewalk to mark the time the Minneapolis officer's knee was on George Floyd's neck. Returning home, Breedlove posted his report on Facebook. On June 3, as Black Lives Matter protesters gathered in Sequim, Washington, Seth Larson was calling on his Facebook followers—armed "patriots"—to protect the town from antifa activists he believed were coming to the march. Calls made to that day reflected the different views of what was happening on the ground.
Tapes have been edited for length and to withhold callers' identities. Dan Larson was away from Forks on June 3, but when a buddy texted saying that their Facebook friend needed help, he posted this warning on his Facebook page:. Three busloads of rioters dressed in black just showed up in Sequim! Forks could be next, they want guys from the peninsula to join together to protect our communities! We help them, they help us!
0コメント