The bar next door to my shop has motorcycle club events from time to time. It’s not ideal because it means there are a bunch of people smoking pot and cigarettes everywhere and the parking lot gets full of toxic masculinity and motorcycles. This is bad for my business and for my next door neighbor Joel who owns the cleaners one door down from my shop.
A few weeks ago, during one of these events, one of the attendees and his girlfriend were smoking outside of our businesses even though there was a no smoking sign right above their heads. It drives us crazy to have smoke pouring into our shops so we take turns telling people to please, if they don’t mind, if they could not smoke right outside? thank you very much.
It was Joel’s turn that day so he wandered out and politely asked them to smoke somewhere else. The guy exploded. Started saying he’d kill Joel and that he had killed kids before so he sure as hell could kill Joel and so on and so forth. I stuck my head out my door to see a muscular guy with a t shirt and leather jacket getting pulled away from Joel by his girlfriend. She was obviously used to this behavior.
“Come on babe.” She said, tugging at his jacket and rolling her eyes.
Joel, who is a large friendly man, stood there, smiling wryly and shaking his head as they walked off, not believing what he just heard.
Joel called the bar owner to tell her a patron had just threatened to kill him and he shouldn’t be allowed back to her bar because of it. He came back the next day, got in a fight with someone at the bar, was arrested and then got officially banned from returning to the shopping center. It turned out that he worked at the grocery store next door. Once the owner heard about the threat to Joel he immediately fired the guy.
On Monday I got a text from Joel. “Call me”.
“You’re not gonna believe this.” Joel said when he picked up the phone. “Remember that guy that threatened to kill me the other day?”
“Uh huh…”
“Well 2 days ago he stabbed a woman to death and posted it live on Facebook.”
Mark Mechikoff, 39, from Pacifica stabbed Claribel Estrella to death as he recited bible verses and live posted the video on Facebook. People that stumbled across the grisly Facebook post called the police and he was arrested a few hours later. He still had the murder weapon on him. It’s reported that he knew the victim and I wonder if Claribel was the woman that dragged him away from Joel that day.
