A Murder that Says Everything about California

The January 6 stabbing death of 27-year-old Emilie Inman in Berkeley, California, and the arrest of the alleged killer, 22-year-old University of California-Berkeley undergraduate Pablo Gomez, Jr., who is suspected of stabbing another young Berkeley woman although not fatally, remains shrouded in mystery. We don’t know whether Inman was acquainted with her alleged murderer or how he got into the house where she lived on Ashby Street, in one of the most boho neighborhoods in boho Berkeley. But there is one thing we do know: The Inman murder tells us everything we need to know about navy-blue California. The cast of characters alone tells the story:

The alleged killer. Gomez is a certified intersectional twofer, with double-victimological status as both a Latino and also a transgender, or at least a gender-neutral. He self-identitied on his Twitter profile as "nonbinary, pan xicanx who loves dr pepper." The first "x" in "xicanx" is because Latino activists have decided that the Spanish consonant combination "ch" in "Chicano" is colonialist. The second "x" is the gender-neutral substitute for the masculine "o" and feminine "a" in "Chicano" and "Chicana." On the UC-Berkeley campus the 5'-6'' Gomez dabbled in every stylishly progressive cause you can think of. According to his Facebook page, he was majoring in "Chicanx/Latinx studies." He was involved in the campus Queer Alliance Resource Center, and, according to news accounts, was a "senior climate action fellow" at the campus Alliance for Climate Education (which appears to have recently scrubbed all references to him from its website, although an apparently overlooked photo of him remains). He helped organize a graffiti-chalking to protest the return of a UC-Berkeley law professor who had been found in violation of the university's sexual-harassment policy. He was on the scene of a Black Lives Matter-style freeway blocking to protest the 2014 Ferguson killing. In September 2016 he was captured on video harassing UC-Berkeley's College Republicans and trying to grab what was said to be a Donald J. Trump poster. His tweet history included such statements as "The United States is a violent white supremacist empire whose only fate is annihilation." You have to wonder when he found time to study.

The oh-so politically correct news site. Reporting on the alleged homicide and related stabbing, Berkeleyside.com switched the personal pronoun with which it referred to Gomez from "he" to "they" after a friend of Gomez informed the site that they was the pronoun he preferred to use. Because respecting an alleged murderer's preferred pronoun is more important than clearly reporting who did what to whom.

The governor. That would be Jerry Brown, the Democrat at the helm of California since 2011. Gomez got his picture taken sitting on a couch with Brown, a save-the-planet promoter himself, at a 2014 "summit" on climate change in Oakland, California. Both were speakers at the summit, Gomez representing the Alliance for Climate Education. That photo, too, has been officially scrubbed, although screenshots of it abound.

The billionaire who paid some of the bills. Sharing the couch in the photo with Brown and Gomez, and in fact with his arm fraternally draped over Gomez's shoulder was Tom Steyer, now 59, a former hedge-fund manager and current philanthropist, environmental activist, and fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's failed Democratic presidential campaign. Right now Steyer is underwriting an advertising campaign against former Exxon/Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump's pick for secretary of state.