A judge tossed a case, finding no probable cause on Saturday after Florida police arrested a man as part of an ongoing standoff over art at a crosswalk memorializing the 2016 mass shooting at the LGBTQ Pulse nightclub in Orlando, WESH reported. The man has been released from jail.
Florida Highway Patrol arrested Sebastian Suarez during a protest Friday night outside the nightclub. He colored the bottom of his shoe with chalk and then left footprints as he crossed the street. He was facing a charge of defacing a traffic device.
“To come here and do something like this, and to be threatened with something so extreme as a felony charge for protesting and showing love to your fellow human, it’s just insane in my opinion,” Suarez told WESH.
“We came out here yesterday just to show our support, to come out and help with the chalking,” he said. He and his fiancée are visiting from Georgia.
“We put some chalk down on the ground, and before we knew it, an officer was approaching us, saying, ‘We wanna talk to you,’” he said. “I identified myself, tried to do everything the correct way, and before I knew it, I was in the back of a squad car.”
In 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 at the Pulse nightclub, making it the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. at the time. The crosswalk was created in 2017 to memorialize the victims.
The memorial has since become an issue for Republicans amid Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ongoing culture war against LGBTQ Americans.
Last month, Trump’s administration directed governors to remove “distracting” art in the road. “Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks,” Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on social media. “Political banners have no place on public roads.”
Last week, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), controlled by DeSantis, painted over the Pulse rainbow sidewalk, months after it issued new guidance banning “non-standard surface markings, signage, and signals.”
“We will not allow our state roads to be commandeered for political purposes,” DeSantis posted on X on Aug. 21.
Protesters have been coloring the rainbow back in with chalk, and FDOT has been painting over it in black and white.
Now, there are signs on the sidewalk that say, “DEFACING ROADWAY PROHIBITED.”
“Anything previously permitted or installed you can bring up from [the] past is irrelevant now” under FDOT’s new rules the department’s secretary, Jared Perdue, said earlier this week, adding that it’s “removing everything that’s not compliant with state [or] federal standards.
Suarez “was the first person to take a fall in this political fight against the LGBTQ community, which I am an active part of,” his attorney, Blake Simons, told reporters. “This is a community I belong to.”
“They’re not injuring or damaging property using water-soluble chalk,” he said.
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