Just over a week ago the Satanic Temple, unwavering disciples of the Prince of Darkness and aspiring adopt-a-highway participants, performed a Pink Mass over the grave of Catherine Idalette Johnston, the mother of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr. Westboro has yet to officially comment on the eternal gaying of its leader’s dead mom, but the owner of the cemetery where the ceremony was performed has filed charges with the local police department. The captain of the Meridian PD, Dean Harper, told local news station WTOK-TV on Monday that they were “in the process of constructing affidavits” and “will have [the satanists] arrested as soon as [they] can.” He added, “It is an unusual crime that we haven’t come across—to my knowledge—in a while.”
Harper told the Huffington Post today that the original charges of tresspasing, malicious mischief, and indecent exposure (thanks to Lucien tea-bagging Catherine Johnston’s grave, which can be seen here) have been dropped because “the judge refused to sign a warrant on them.” In the end, Lucien has been charged with desecration of a grave.
If this sort of case was thrown onto the desk of another small town police department, one that, say, was located in a community with few serious crimes, it would be fine for the department to pursue what is, essentially, an exercise in the misuse of police time and energy. People—including police officers—get bored and need something to occupy their time. Meridian, unfortunately, is not one of those sleepy towns.
According to Neighborhood Scout, a website owned by a research and data-mining company that collects crime statistics from around the country, Meridian is—and I’m paraphrasing here—sketchy as fuck. Based on a crime index of 0 to 100—100 being a crime-free utopia and 0 being the inside of one of Trevino Morales’s vats of acid—Meridian gets a four. By way of comparison, Brooklyn, New York, clocks in at 40. Detroit, one of the most dangerous cities in America, is a two.
One would think that a town with a population of around 41,000 and a crime-index rating almost on par with a city that has become a byword for blight and criminal activity would take a pass on devoting time and resources to chasing a few out-of-towners who performed a harmless little Satanic ceremony in a graveyard. After all, the Satanic Temple and its members are based in New York, meaning—as the Huffington Post and the Gauntlet have mentioned—an arrest for charges filed in Mississippi is unlikely.