Neighbors heard the sound of breaking glass coming from the Willits, California Masonic lodge in the early hours of last Monday morning, it was reported.
Police arrived, and believing a prowler to still be inside the building, shouted out a warning that they were about to turn loose a police dog inside the building.
Micheal Jay Overholt, 25, of Willits, stepped out of a closet and surrendered without incident.
He was arrested for possession of a dangerous weapon, vandalism, possession of stolen property and burglary in the second degree. According to police, Overholt had several items from within the building and a pair of illegal double-edged fixed blade knives about 6-1/2 inches long in his possession when taken into custody.
No one has ever accused criminals of necessarily being smart, but this one strikes me as especially stupid.
There he is, caught like a rabbit, but given the opportunity to walk out on his own. Seems to me he would have hidden the knives and dropped the loot. Quite possibly, without those things "in his possession" when he surrendered, he might possibly have only been charged with vandalism, breaking and entering, and perhaps burglary, depending on how the law in that state is written.
A smarter crook would have ditched the pillowcase-full of Masonic Treasure and the matching carving knives, wouldn't you think? I wonder what kind of cool Masonic things he was stealing? What's in a Masonic lodge building worth taking?
Referring to a specific case where a brother stole £48,000 (about $99,000 US) from his grand lodge and Mark Masters lodge in Northumberland, England, Bro. Chris Connop, a representative of the United Grand Lodge of England said, "We expect high standards of our members and if they fall by our standards, then they are no longer a Freemason."
In this case, a well-paid ($150,000 per year) financial manager, 55-year-old David Glass, who had been a Mason for over 15 years, lost his job, and after exhausting his lines of credit and selling his home, embezzled funds from his brethren.
This story, and Bro. Connop's statement, raised a number of questions in my mind. Some of the questions are specific to United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) Masons. Other questions are more general in nature. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.
At what point, if any, could this have been avoided? Could, would, or should his local brethren have offered financial assistance and/or financial advice to their brother in distress, had they been aware of his situation before the crime was committed?
Funds stolen between November 2004 and November 2005 apparently weren't even noticed missing until November 2006. Should a system have been in place that provided more immediate oversight? Should just one man have the ability to write checks and withdraw from lodge bank accounts?
Bro. Connop's comment that when members fail to meet Masonic standards they are no longer Masons leads me to wonder how, in England, the removal of a Mason is carried out. Is there a "trial," or does a conviction in a government court automatically cause a brother to be expelled from the fraternity?
Have you (American, British or otherwise) ever seen or participated in a Masonic trial? What did you think of it? Was it fair and impartial, even if the accused had already been convicted of a crime by the government courts, or was it mere formality with the outcome already pre-determined? Was the accused found guilty by his Masonic judges? If found guilty, was the accused expelled, suspended, or did he just receive a slap on the wrist? Were the charges even justified in the first place?
What particular actions by a Mason, whether the actions are legally considered crimes or not, do you think should warrant a trial and/or expulsion for a Mason? Are specific crimes and actions that are considered unmasonic spelled out in your codes, or is the interpretation of "unmasonic conduct" left to the conscience (or whim) of the accuser?
Does your lodge or grand lodge bring charges against a brother only after he is convicted of a crime, or do they take action before conviction, based only on accusation? Do they ever take action against a brother for unmasonic conduct that is not an actual crime?
Last week two women in Waterville, Maine looked out their front door to find a "highly intoxicated" 19-year-old naked man lying on their front porch.
They called police.
"They looked out and saw this man on their enclosed porch," Deputy Police Chief Charles Rumsey said at the time. "When they saw him they could clearly see his private parts and were absolutely offended and terrified with what they were confronted with."
The man had a history of doing bizarre things. He was on probation for the 2006 burglary and vandalism of the Waterville Masonic lodge. He and fellow high school students broke into and vandalized the lodge on several occasions.
According to a news article in the Kennebec Journal,
Police said the destruction began with stealing and destroying items from a storage trailer on the Masonic Lodge grounds. There were at least two subsequent attacks on the building, according to police reports.
Among the items taken was a picture album that featured about 200 photos of prominent Masonic Lodge members dating to the late 1800s. The teens allegedly used a gun to shoot the photo album.
All of the photos in the album were damaged. Police said they believe they recovered everything stolen from the lodge. The perpetrators also damaged windows and clocks, and discharged a fire extinguisher inside the building. The youths also plugged drains to flood the kitchen with water and later stole swords and paperwork from the building.
The victim, Mark A. Wright, was a "god-fearing man who went to church every Sunday," a member of his church told reporters. There is no mention of whether Wright was a Freemason.
A second story from the same newspaper reported that the alleged killer
Rene Stermole decided some time ago that Wright was not only a terrorist in touch with Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafi, but also was tied in with Mafia members, biker gangs, El Rukn street gangsters from Chicago and various other figures out to do him harm. Stermole had worried for many years that his shadowy enemies would come after him and guarded himself accordingly: They threatened to attack his wife, so he never married, and they used Wright to stalk him, so he got a digital camera to document it, he told police.
Stermole has been associated with the anti-Masonic website TheForbiddenKnowledge.com for the past ten years.
Apparently Stermole is a Christian believer in "end-times" prophecy, and blames all sorts of bogeymen for the world's woes. His website indicates he suffers from major paranoia, and lists as "partners" FreemasonryWatch.org, Illuminati-News.com, and a group called Wake Up America. His site includes a link to audio files by the late paranoid conspiracy theorist / UFO nut William Cooper, author of Behold a Pale Horse.
Stermole himself apparently has written a 13-chapter book titled "America's Subversion: The Enemy Within, which can be found here.
On this page you'll find his diatribe against Bro. Ed King of MasonicInfo.com. Stermole begins his rant by saying "Ed King's website is full of lies and deceit. He fails miserably in disproving Freemasonry is Satanic to the core." Here's a link to Bro. Ed's mocking, giggling article "exposing" Stermole's anti-Masonic website Bible Defense.
No, seriously. If Christianity is your sacred cow, stop reading now. I'm about to throw a little leftover Memorial Day hamburger on the grill.
It becomes more and more obvious to me that there must be something inherently wrong with a belief-system that generates this kind of madness and mayhem.
First case in point: A 19-year old man in the Texas Bible-belt microwaved his infant daughter. His wife, who is standing by him, said "the devil made him do it" to keep him from becoming a preacher.
Second case in point: Jack Chick. This guy has to be one of the nuttiest Christians ever. A hate-filled "loving" Christian, he's been producing sicko Christian tracts for what seems like forever, bashing every faith and belief other than his own warped view of Christianity. Michael at Full in Bull was discussing his tracts, and said that when he was in college he and his friends voted "The Last Generation" as the most ridiculous Jack Chick tract of all. I haven't read (and won't) all of Chick's tracts, but I remember laughing at them even as a kid. The theme that runs through Chick's pamphlets is fear. Fear and love are opposites; you can't use fear to send someone running into the loving arms of Jesus.
Point the third: Several weeks ago I wrote about a Mason-basher I'd discovered on the MySpace knock-off site YourChristianSpace.com. I set up an account there, and poked around through the weeds. It didn't take long to find the rantings of a 15-year-old girl aglow with Christian compassion. In the bulletin section, where everyone was sure to see it, was her breathless exhortation: "Please!!!! Everyone!!! YOU MUST SEE THIS VIDEO!!!" On her page was embedded the warped little movie you'll find at the bottom of this post, titled "Letter from Hell."
Her webspace indicated she'd been "born again" at the age of six, which means she has been inculcated — brainwashed if you will — into an evangelical form of the world's largest cult for nine years. Is this the kind of thing an otherwise intelligent youngster should have on her mind? Worrying that she will be responsible for someone else going to hell if she doesn't proselytize on a daily basis? I can't even imagine the nightmares this woman-child must have, and the neuroses she'll carry into adulthood.
Sunday an old friend contacted me, wanting to ask my advice on a personal matter. We hadn't spoken in a long time. She is a woman I dated briefly several years ago. We didn't go the romantic route, but became friends. As divorced people are apt to do, we talked a lot about our marriages.
Saturday night her oldest daughter, age 21, broke up with her longtime boyfriend. Her daughter is a sweet, decent, happy, deeply spiritual but not conventionally religious, outgoing young college student who is active in liberal causes. Her boyfriend of seven years ( ! ) had been a rowdy, alcohol-and-drug-abusing going-nowhere punk.
When her daughter got home Saturday night, she had a daughter-to-mother cry, and told her mom things she hadn't heard before.
About a year ago, she was told Saturday night, the boyfriend had "date-raped" her daughter. After that, he used the excuse that since they'd already had sex, they should continue. The daughter said she went along with it, but found it "messy" at best, saying it "did nothing for her."
It gets worse.
Somewhere along the way this otherwise rational young women had picked up this self-judgmental belief system: That she is ruined, and can never marry anyone else because she's had sex. She can't "give herself" to another man as a "pure woman." She's also disgusted by the idea of ever having sex with a man who has been with another woman.
It's not about disease, or safe sex, or any reason remotely rational. It's a warped idea about self-worth, and not an idea, I'm guessing, she came up with without some external stimulus.
My friend was bewildered at her daughter's attitude, because it is not something the daughter learned from the mother. Her other two, younger daughters, do not share the same attitude, either.
While talking to my friend, I remembered our long-ago discussions about her ex-husband. He had considered himself to be deeply religious. He carried a Bible with him everywhere he went. I hate to admit this, but he was also a Freemason. (I do not know him, and his lodge is at least 150 miles away from me.) Whenever anyone asked about Masonry, he said he'd be killed if he spoke even a word about it. He was also a heavy drinker, and would tell you all about Masonry when he drank.
He strongly believed women should not experience sexual pleasure, that it was all for the man, and that women should be punished if they felt desire or responded to desire.
He was a sometime violent and very controlling man, she said.
My meager contribution to the conversation was to simply ask if her ex-husband, the father of the daughter, could have been the source of the daughter's skewed self image, and whether her seven-year attraction to her equally controlling, "screwed-up" boyfriend could have been an attempt to use him as a replacement father-figure.
My friend, who had put her ex-husband out of mind for years (he seldom sees his children) was shocked, not that I had asked, but that I was probably right.
Needless to say, her reaction opened up issues better left unmentioned here.
My point is this: There is something about religion that makes some people crazy. It's not just Christians; it's readily apparent in Islam, too. The zealotry and the better-that-thou attitudes taught by religions set up in followers the psychological need to convert others to their way of thinking, by physical force or mental intimidation, or both, if necessary. It creates an us-versus-them mentality, where the "us" are more righteous than the "heathens" who don't follow the same religious belief system. Often religious people even squabble with their own kind, who happen to believe only slightly differently; Protestants vs. Catholics, for example, or consider the hatred between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Religions have set themselves up as moral authorities which push its adherents to want to be judge and jury on private matters, like sex, or alcohol consumption, or the subjugation of women, or how many times you pray and what compass direction you bow towards. And religions have fostered beliefs in some odd, superstitious things, too, like Hell and Satan and that dead people can get up and walk out of their graves.
Just as Masons congregate on this blog and elsewhere to discuss the changes needed in Freemasonry, and debate what is the real point of Freemasonry and how best to get back to it, so too should Christians discuss and get back to — soon, I hope — the whole point of Christianity.
Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God, and the second to love your neighbor. He didn't say anything about judging them, or killing them, or treating your wife badly, or making your kids a bit crazy with bizarre attitudes about sex or fears of Hell.
I'm pretty sure Jesus wouldn't approve of his followers microwaving babies, either.
This article was originally posted Friday morning, May 11. It has been updated and moved to the top of the stack on Saturday morning and again on Sunday afternoon.
W. Bro. Grady Bozeman, Senior Grand Deacon of the Grand Lodge of Georgia, was shot and killed Thursday afternoon in a workplace dispute in Bluffton, South Carolina, about 25 miles from Savannah, Georgia.
Bro. Bozeman was a Past Master of Pickens Star Lodge No. 220, F. & A.M., of Jasper, Georgia. He was also a member of the Scottish Rite, York Rite, and Order of the Eastern Star.
I will update this article as new information becomes available.
FINAL UPDATE Sunday 5/13 4:45 pm: I've just returned from the graveside Masonic service after the funeral of Bro. Bozeman. A large crowd, perhaps 500 or more, were at the church, and well over 200, most of them Masons, were at the grave site.
UPDATE Sunday 5/13, 9:30 am: Here's an article where they're spelling Bro. Bozeman's name correctly again, with further details about the shooting and about the shooter's private life.
UPDATE Saturday 5/12, 10 pm: The brothers of Excelsior Lodge of Milwaukee, Wisconsin have offered their condolences to the brethren of Georgia on their website, and announced "there will be a moment of silence followed by a round of knocks (with one missing to signify the loss of our brother) prior to our Fellowcraft degree on May 14."
UPDATE Saturday 5/12, 9:20 pm: I've found several more articles about the shooting that I missed yesterday because Bro. Bozeman's name was incorrectly spelled "Boseman." Here's a link to the Associated Press story, which was published on dozens of TV and newspaper websites with the incorrect spelling. Most of the versions used a headline similar to this: "Shooting that killed 3 began after gunman called 'crazy.'"
Other articles give more details. The two contractors had been feuding earlier in the day. Bro. Bozeman came to the scene to find out why a crew wasn't working. When told by Rolondo Matta that there was a problem with James Mobley, Bro. Bozeman said, "Don't worry about him — he's crazy." Mobley overheard that statement, and pulled a gun from his lunchbox and began shooting Bro. Bozeman, striking him eight times in the head and upper body, before shooting Matta six times and then himself in the head.
The weapon used was a Glock .40 caliber auto-pistol. Mobley had a concealed weapons permit.
From a report released by the sheriff's department:
Motive: Rolando Matta was the painting sub-contractor for the construction project. Mobley was an electrical sub-contractor on the site. Earlier in the day Matta and Mobley had a disagreement over access to perform their specific jobs. Boseman, the general contractor, arrived on the site and questioned why Matta and his crew were sitting idle. When Matta explained his inactivity Boseman made the statement: “Don’t worry about him, he’s crazy.”
Mobley heard the comment, began angry and produced a weapon from his lunch pail and confronted Boseman first, shooting him and then turning the weapon on Matta. He then retreated to the corner of the building where he turned the weapon on himself. Mobley did possess a current concealed weapons permit from SLED.
The police report seems to be the source of the misspelled name.
UPDATE Saturday 5/12, 11:10 am: Bro. Bozeman's body is en route from South Carolina to Jasper, Georgia. Visitation will commence at 6 pm Saturday at Cagle Funeral Home [directions] in downtown Jasper, Georgia.
His funeral will be held at 2 pm Sunday, May 13, at Mt. Zion Baptist Church [map] in Jasper, on Old Highway 5 (Talking Rock Road) not far from Pickens Star Lodge.
UPDATE Friday 5/11, 8:20 pm: Within the past hour WTOC-TV in Savannah filed two new stories about the event. The first article, by Liz Flynn, cited Bro. Bozeman's Masonic ties and quoted Georgia Past Grand Master M. W. Bro. Clyde Griffin. There is also a newscast video that can be linked to from the news article (small link is just above Bro. Bozeman's photo).
The second article, by Jaime Dailey, deals more with the events surrounding the killing, and reports that Bro. Bozeman stepped between the two fighting men and said to Rolando Matta, one of the subcontractors, "Don't worry about him, he's crazy!", referring to James Mobley. Mobley then pulled a handgun from his lunchbox and shot Bro. Bozeman eight times, and then shot Matta several times. He then went into a corner and turned the gun on himself. Mobley fired a total of 17 rounds.
A Virgin Islands man was removed as a juror in a murder trial jury for allegedly flashing Masonic hand gestures to the defendant and others in the courtroom, including witnesses.
William Curtis, chief investigator for the V.I. Justice Department, said two prosecutors asked him on Wednesday to come to court and keep an eye on the suspect juror. Curtis said he is familiar with Masonic signals and did not recognize any of the juror's movements and gestures as having significance, but prosecutors asked [the judge] to remove the man from the jury.
Later in the trial, Elvet Carty was called as a character witness for former police detective Joel Dowdye, charged with murdering his ex-girlfriend and trying to murder her companion in a downtown hotel room.
Carty said his friend Dowdye was dedicated to the community and donated his time to working with at-risk children.
Under cross-examination Carty admitted he was Dowdye's Masonic lodge brother after the prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Cornelius Williams, asked him if he was wearing a Masonic ring.
One of the first phone calls Dowdye made after the murder was to Carty.
When Williams asked whether Dowdye is a Freemason, Dowdye answered, "Just like you, sir." Williams denied in court that he was a Mason.
Are shootings at parties held at Masonic lodges becoming the latest trend?
In January, we reported on a shooting at Mt. Nebo Masonic Lodge in Los Angeles, where a party-goer was killed by police after he had shot and wounded a fellow partyer.
This week brings us two more stories of shootings at gatherings held at Masonic lodges. No indication has been given that the events were actual Masonic get-togethers; most likely the parties were held by outside groups renting lodge halls.
Last Saturday night, Feb. 17, police in Berlin, Maryland, responded to a report of several shots being fired at local lodge. Several members of the crowd fled as deputies arrived. A man with a deep cut to his head was found and taken to a nearby hospital.
Last night (Feb. 24), four people were shot in the parking lot of a Pompano Beach, Florida Masonic lodge where a party was being held. Three of the four were critically injured and the other was seriously wounded, police said.
The party erupted into gunfire about two hours after seven people were shot at a nearby strip club where a rap artist had been performing. It is unclear from reports if the two events were related.
It seems that in addition to our Fraternity needing to guard our inner doors, keeping unqualified men from joining our ranks, lodges need to more fully investigate who they're renting their fellowship halls to. So far this year, at least seven people — that's about one per week — have been killed or seriously wounded by gunfire on Masonic lodge property across the country.
Update Tuesday, Feb. 27:A later news story identified the Florida lodge where the shooting took place to be McBride Lodge No. 390 in Fort Lauderdale.
Alan Halliday, 37, pushed two wheelie bins against the front door of the lodge in Dunbar, East Lothian, and set them on fire, causing $28,000 in damage to the building.
Halliday told police he did it because the Masons were a secret society and he thought they were spreading rumors about him.
This just in to our All-Monkey News Network news desk:
