The OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley on one of California’s most awful hate crimes: We joke, in Orange County, about beige and white, about beige carpets in beige homes behind beige walls in beige housing tracts, and white walls in the beige homes. We joke because beige and white aren’t really colors, and color suggests excitement, and Orange County, particularly South County, is, well, anything but exciting. We joke until we see something like a crime-scene photograph of a Tustin apartment, from the summer of 2002. The apartment had been ransacked, its once-white walls now grotesquely spattered burgundy, and on carpet that had been beige but is now turning almost black, there’s a bedspread. The bedspread, we’ll learn, covered the mutilated corpse of a nude man. He was hog-tied from behind with white athletic socks. Though he suffered a myriad of injuries, the most serious wounds were deep gashes in the top and back of the head, wounds that, by the time the photograph was taken, had attracted an army of ants. The lethal weapon, an unopened bottle of Moet & Chandon, lay nearby, covered in blood. (Thanks Alex.)
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