Louisiana Voice

You’ve seen ‘em in your email inbox: Those offers from the widow of a Nigerian prince to deposit millions of dollars into your account or some variation thereof—an offer that seems too good to be true (it is).

More recently, I’ve become the recipient of a blitz of text messages from someone who apparently thinks my cell number is that of the Beastie Boys, whatever a Beastie Boy is (oh, stop it. I know they’re a boy band even though I wouldn’t know them from those boys from the Backstreet).

Then there are those calls from Carmen representing something called Card Services and offering to reduce my credit card interest rate. Those wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so persistent as to call me four or five times a week.

And we’ve all received those emails that begin with, “This is a true story…” Right away, you know it isn’t.

But Saturday night I received the most despicable, outrageous, disgusting—and frightening—email yet. Out of an abundance of caution I have forwarded the email to State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson, Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and Attorney General Jeff Landry.

Normally, when I receive these kinds of emails, they are asking me to pursue some kind of fantastic theory involving some conspiracy or other in hopes I will do a story—apparently to legitimize or validate their whack-o story, I immediately delete them. It is those from which I run fast and far.

The one I received Saturday falls into that category and normally would be deleted with never another thought. But this nut case is so out-there and offers up such an absurd, obnoxious scenario, I felt it necessary to write about it—not to appease him but to put others on alert that these people really do walk among us, albeit wearing aluminum foil hats.

In a nutshell (and we do mean nut), this is his story: There were no shootings that took the lives of three police officers and wounded three others, one critically. The entire thing was something called a “Multi-Jurisdictional X-Plan Drill” financed by Homeland Security and is an example of “stolen valor at its worst,” an “Oceans (sic) Eleven-style rip-off.”

If that enough to make your skin crawl, there’s more.

This weirdo’s objection was to the $250,000, plus $25,000 for each surviving child being paid to the widows of the three slain officers—and U.S. Rep. Garrett Graves and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy are trying to secure an additional $340,000 for each of the three families, he points out, apparently blaming Cassidy for his daughter’s unsuccessful audition for a singing part in a 2010 Suess (sic) play (honest: that’s what he wrote).

And of course, he never reveals his identity, using only this email address:

batonrougehoax@gmail.com

“I need assistance exposing this hoax, which includes the entire State Government of Louisiana as well as the entire Government of the United States Corporation,” he wrote. “We need to move quickly before they get away with this gigantic pigeon drop game of theirs.”

What?!!? I mean, WHAT?!!???

            Hold on. It gets more bizarre. Much more bizarre. I’m telling you folks, this guy’s a few croutons short of a full salad. In need of a little more special sauce for his Big Mac. A couple of Thou Shalt Nots shy of a Commandment. Here is more of his claim :

• “The ‘officers’ (meaning the three who were killed and, presumably, the one still in critical condition) are FAKE!!! They are not real people at all. These images (their photos, shown by media nationwide—and included with his incoherent rant) are photo-shopped (sic)!!!”

In his mind (or what’s left of it), he may somehow believe that. But I know for a certainty they are real. The three who were killed and the one who is still fighting for his life as I write this are all residents of Livingston Parish, where I live. I know the subdivision in which each lives. I know their neighbors. My daughters attended school with Nicholas Tullier who is a native of Denham Springs and who clings to life after multiple surgeries. He was shot in the head with a real bullet and he is a real person with a real family, this real idiot’s claim notwithstanding.

In a grassy knoll, we-didn’t-really-send-astronauts-to-the-moon twisted method of reasoning, he writes:

• “You pay for the hoax, and then you pay for the protection. It’s the old Chicago-style mobster mentality…You pay for the initial Homeland Security Exercise, which scares the hell out of everybody because the media broadcasts it on the ‘news’ as if it’s real. And then you pay for militarized police protection from the boogie man. And then they get you out the back side with your feelings of compassion with their disgraceful and shameless pleas for donations for the ‘victims’ when they’ve got you pegged as the victim the whole time!”

Incredibly, he poses the rhetorical question, apparently forgetting for the moment that the shooter was killed at the scene: “If this were true, don’t you think that there would have been an arrest of some sore here? This is all fake scripted out nonsense designed to try and control and manipulate your emotional capacities. There is no truth to any of this. The entire drama that was acted out on the streets of Baton Rouge was a parade. And if you think it’s real…you have literally been played like a fiddle.”

Here’s more:

• “…First, they scare the s–t out of everybody with their fake video shooting of Alton Stirling (sic) by the Baton Rouge City Police. Then they tie it together with this ridiculous, asinine video of the fake murder of Philando Castile by the police in St. Anthony, Minnesota. And to top it all off, we go to Dallas, Texas for that incredibly spectacular Multi-Jurisdictional X-Plan Drill, and then to top it all off (how many toppings was that?), we’re back here in Baton Rouge with the grand finally (sic): the exciting and dramatic event at the B-Quick on Airline Hwy.
• “Truth is: No one shot. No one dead.”

DISCLAIMER: Folks, I remind you, the foregoing diatribe is in no way affiliated with LouisianaVoice or any of its representatives. It is the ranting of a demented person who is so full of venom and hatred as to be completely and totally disoriented—and potentially dangerous. Again, I remind you that the ONLY reason for presenting this (and this is the condensed edition of his rant, by the way) is to illustrate that there are those out there, probably next you in line at Wal-Mart or the drug store (check that: they’re probably off their medication), or next to you in traffic or perhaps even in the office cubicle next to yours who are riding on the Disoriented Express.

While our initial reaction to his frothing at the mouth may be to laugh it off as just another nut job, it isn’t funny in the least. This is very kind of thinking that prompts mass shootings at elementary schools that take the lives of the most innocent among us.

Times have changed. When I was in school, we had fire drills. Later, they had those ridiculously naïve atomic bomb drills where the kids would crawl under their desks (I missed out on that). Today, Louisiana State law requires that schools conduct lockdown drills within the first couple of weeks of the new school year and periodically thereafter in preparation for one of these maniacal assaults. Children shouldn’t have to concern themselves about what they would do to protect themselves from a shooter.

It would behoove us as adults to be ever-vigilant, to make ourselves aware of any action on the part of anyone what appears out of the ordinary. This person’s wild-eyed, profanity-laced invective is just the sort of thing that should keep us alert and aware.