ISLAMOPHOBIC PREACHER CHARGED W-TAGGING BUILDINGS

Special to El Rrun-Rrun
The prime suspect in the spraying painting of Islamophobic graffiti that had been appearing on the walls of downtown businesses has turned himself in, the Brownsville Police Department has confirmed.

Genovevo Izaguirre, the pastor of the Mision Divina, was charged with five counts of graffiti and released on a $10,0000 surety bond on Monday. Police say that the preacher showed up at the police department on Jackson Street and turned himself in after he found out that  police detectives were looking for him to serve him with a criminal warrant.

Izaguirre's tagging, some downtown shop keepers say, wasn't the benign anti-gentrification brand of protest on an Elon Musk-funded mural, but rather, it appeared to be more of an attempt to incite hate against the Islamic faithful who, as far as we know, mostly keep to themselves and worship in peace in their own homes or temples.

The graffiti started to appear on buildings like the Palm Lounge, Pluton Brewery across 8th Street, Parra's Furiture, the Zorba's sports store, and some finance companies a block east on Washington Street.

Alarmed that the graffiti on their walls would contribute to the social tensions and religious intolerance generated by the Israeli-Palestinian war raging across the Mideast, business owners reported the incidents to the Brownsville Police Department and told them that the defacing of their walls had started around Monday, October 16. 

The BPD took the report and told them that they would check the downtown surveillance system, a $500,000 system installed to deter just such offenses.

But when the cops went to check their high-tech, high-priced eye-in-the-sky they told the local owners that the system had been down during the time that the perpetrators had sprayed the graffiti on nearby walls. 

"I couldn't believe it," said one of the business owners." "You have this expensive surveillance system and it's not working? Yet, there was an accident the other day when old man ran the light at Eighth and Elizabeth Street and they recorded that. It sounded kind of strange. So we checked the cameras on our building and we saw the person painting the graffiti clear as day. As a matter of fat, it was at exactly 7 p.m. on Monday, October 16 when it was recorded. We showed them to the detectives and they got a copy of the tape."

Izaguirre's Mision Divina is an evangelical church sandwiched betwen the Yerberia Azteca and a finance company on Elizabeth. In the tape, clear as day, Izaguirre is recorded using a spray can of black paint on the wall of the Palm Lounge facing 8th Street and then standing before his work facing the camera and and then walking away.

Business owners said that when he became aware that there had been complaints to the police about his handiwork, Izaguirre paid them a personal visit and tried to smooth over the issue, saying that he would paint over the graffiti and call it even. One, the Zorba sports store, allowed to have the signs painted over. Others refused on advice of the investigating police detectives.

"He (Izaguirre) came to the Palm Lounge with a heavy-set companion and demanded to talk to the owner (Edwin Hernandez) to apologize and offered to have someone paint over the signs," said a worker who was tending bar when they arrived there this last Sunday. "Edwin wouldn't talk to him and said that the police detectives had told him not to touch the signs until they had gathered the necessary evidence. He told us to tell him he did not want them to touch his building and they left."

Another of the affected businesses was the Pluton Brewery, whose wall facing the alley was decorated with the anti-Islam graffiti (second picture from the top). Danny Arizpe, one of the owners, said Izaguirre walked in with another man and said he was a Vietnam Air Force veteran and born-again Christian, that suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that he was willing to let bygones be bygones and put the incident behind them.

"We didn't agree to anything," Arizpe said. "As a business we have to be inclusive and cater to everyone, regardless of their religion, their race, or lifestyle. "Having that on our walls goes against all that. After he spoke to us he left."

But then Arizpe and the others found out that Izaguirre had gone to the police department an spoke to the detectives on the case telling them that he had straightened out the matter with the full agreement of the affected businesses. Detectives told him that none of the business owner they had spoken to had told them anything about an agreement and said they were proceeding withe case.

"The detectives said that based on the evidence and his own admission that he had painted the anti-Islamic graffiti, they were seeking a criminal arrest warrant on Izaguirre," Arizpe said. 

Then owners said that they looked up Izaguirre's Facebook page and discovered that the pastor calls himself a fire-and-brimstone "Apostole" who ministers to a similar evangelical congregation in Matamoros as he does in Brownsville and, that besides posting anti-Islamic memes, he was also posting memes disparaging the city's LGBTQ Task Force and same-sex couple adoptions, among others of similar ilk. 

One business owner said that Izaguirre had twisted El Hueso del Fraile's celebration of El Dia de las Brujas into being witch and devil worship.

Before he turned himself in, no one at Mision Divina could say where Izaguirre was. Downtown  business owners are glad the intolerant graffiti has stopped and are hoping that the outcome of the case will be the end of the defacing of their shops..