Like many Americans, Larry Lappin woke up on Independence Day, dressed himself in some over-the-top American garb, and proceeded to get day drunk.
Unlike many Americans, Lappin, 52, of Petaluma, CA, also accosted his neighbors—allegedly for playing Spanish-language music in their own home—and bombarded them with threats and xenophobic rants. Predictably, it was all captured on a smartphone by Ivette Celedon, 30, and quickly went viral once posted to Facebook.
Classic quotes from Lappin’s drunken hate tantrum include, “This is MY country! On Fourth of July. You want to go against me?” He also tells Celedon to shut up, and makes vague threats like “Just wait, motherfucker,” in addition to mocking some of the partygoers’ accents and his own inability to understand them. Children can be heard in the background, bearing early witness to the hatred that is omnipresent in our nation today.
The door is ultimately closed in Lappin’s face and the 55-second clip ends...but truly, this Northern Californian’s story was just beginning.
Celedon’s video went viral, and has been viewed over 1.2 million times as of this writing. She tells The Press-Democrat that she never thought it would happen in my hometown.”
Celedon says life has been a blur since she posted the video online, and it was difficult to explain to her two kids why Lappin confronted them over such a thing as music.
“This is not OK, you can’t do that to people,” said Celedon. “We weren’t doing anything to anybody except celebrating.”
Their music wasn’t playing very loud, and Lappin actually had much louder music at the time, Celedon said, but they didn’t complain about it.
Lappin was quickly identified and approached by the media, but his initial attempts to mitigate the backlash to his bigoted Fourth freakout leave a lot to be desired.
In a phone interview on July 5th, Lappin told KPIX 5 he is sorry.
“I made a huge mistake,” Lappin said. “I had been drinking too much and a little thing set me off and it really bugged me.”
It’s like the bigots have learned NOTHING from Roseanne Barr’s ineffective “Ambien” defense. Lappin wasn’t done digging his hole, though.
“Sometimes I wish they would assimilate more. I hear them playing [Spanish language] music in the backyard all the time and it doesn’t bother me. Because of the day and what July 4th means to me, I felt disrespected,” Lappin said.
“I’m a very patriotic man,” said Lappin. “Unfortunately that [action] wasn’t representative of a patriot. Just after a long day [the music] hit me the wrong way.”
It was only when KPIX reporters informed him that Celedon and her family are American citizens, going back multiple generations, with servicemembers among them to boot, that Lappin suddenly seemed to finally abandon further attempts to justify of his actions.
“Those are things I didn’t know about them and those are things that make what I did very bad,” he said. “[Playing the music of their choice] is the freedom they are afforded by the people who serve this country.”
A day later, Lappin let the real motive for his flawed “apologies” slip out in another interview.
“I made a mistake. I feel bad for it. I’ve apologized to my neighbor,” he said in an interview Friday. “My life might be ruined.”
He declined to comment further, but expressed concern that his job could be at risk.
It shouldn’t require a presentation of one’s family tree and military history to prove one’s humanity, or take threats to their public image to make a bigot realize that attacking people is “very bad.” Yet here we are.
The local community has rallied around Celadon and her family, and civil rights org Indivisible Petaluma is organizing a private barbecue for them as a “re-do” on their ruined Independence Day, because that’s what communities do—rally around each other.