Mitchell Ralph Todd of Huntington Beach allegedly was intent in November to prove that it’s not just some of his city’s cops who are unhinged.
Todd, 51, is facing arraignment on Friday in Orange County Superior Court’s Newport Beach courthouse for making criminal threats, but that’s not what’s so fascinating.
He’s the owner of OC Doves, a company that specializes in selling unbridled compassion; it is for hire to release doves at funerals in supposed hopes of soothing the pain of those who’ve lost love ones.
However, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office (OCDA), the doves apparently weren’t performing their magic on Todd’s senses.
He got into a dispute over lack of adequate services with a Laguna Beach resident and left “a series of threatening voicemails” that included playing the “recording of the sound of a handgun slide being pulled back and released as if chambering a round,” prosecutors allege.
Alerted to the situation, Laguna Beach Police Department officers searched Todd’s house and found what, after covering crime in this region for nearly a quarter of a century, I’ve learned perfectly fits Orange County: A funeral dove-release company owner who also enjoys possessing Nazi paraphernalia as well as 57 firearms, nearly 30,000 rounds of ammunition—you can never know when Allied forces might return to disrupt maniacal white supremacist notions, a practice bomb, swords and body armor.
The cops probably didn’t find any Prince CDs.
If eventually convicted, this defendant faces a maximum prison term of three years.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.