Pick Up Your Guns: A Message, A Moniker, and a Complaint Filed With Captain Hofstein

Pick Up Your Guns: A Message, A Moniker, and a Complaint Filed With Captain Hofstein

Someone sent a message earlier this evening. Not to me directly — forwarded, “out of concern,” from a resident who knows exactly what my history means and knew exactly what putting it in front of me would do.

The sender: a name I’ll render here as Shitbird #0, the former operator of the Deerfield Beach Cafe. The city evicted her operation after Class Act Restaurant Group filed Chapter 11 with roughly $1.7 million in debt and racked up close to $726,000 in unpaid rent. The city won every hearing. She lost the lease.

Editor’s Note: Toula, if you’re reading this — the cafe closed. The rhetoric didn’t.

Shitbird #0 is a documented ally of Shitbird #1, the man who ran for mayor in 2025, lost to Todd Drosky, and is now the defendant in his own criminal matter over a door pushed “beyond its normal range of motion” at City Hall. He is also, alongside Shitbird #3, the plaintiff currently suing the city to block the November 2026 charter referendum — a suit I filed an amicus brief opposing.

Here’s the sentence from the message that matters, stripped of the surrounding filler about knowledge, courage, and collective mindsets: residents need “the courage to pick up guns and fight in public, in person” against the people running the city. The activists who lack that courage get compared, unfavorably, to nursing-home residents — a chair, a TV, potluck food, waiting it out.

I am, by any reasonable reading of the public record, one of the activists in that sentence. I sued to challenge Shitbird #1’s residency before the 2025 election. I filed against Shitbird #1 and Shitbird #3 again this year. If Shitbird #0 is keeping a list of people who’ve made her preferred candidate’s life difficult in open court, I’m near the top of it.

Why this isn’t background noise

I have a documented, decades-long history of actual violence directed at me — not Facebook heat, not vague online beef. A dog poisoned days after an arrest connected to a prior threat. Bullet holes in a car. Rounds passing overhead. A knife-to-the-head threat delivered in person. A BSO patrol unit parked outside my house for weeks, on the department’s own initiative, because they took a prior threat seriously enough to watch the block around the clock. Physical separations by BSO inside Commission chambers. A shoving match narrowly avoided at a League of Women Voters meeting, a newborn a few inches from the fight.

That’s the file this new message landed on top of. Rhetoric about picking up guns doesn’t get evaluated in a vacuum when the person receiving it has that file. It gets evaluated against the file.

What happens next

I called Captain Adam Hofstein’s office at BSO’s Deerfield Beach district. Getting through required routing past a call center before reaching anyone local — a process worth its own column. I followed up in writing: a formal letter requesting the message be logged, cross-referenced against any existing file involving Shitbird #1, A Shitbird #2, or Shitbird #0’s business, and evaluated against Florida Statute 836.10 (written threats to kill or injure) and Florida Statute 784.048 (stalking, including the “credible threat” and “pattern of conduct” standard). If the pattern holds up, that’s the groundwork for a protective injunction under 784.0485 — not just a strongly worded op-ed.

BSO is also being asked to go talk to Shitbird #0 directly. Not to arrest her. To ask what, specifically, “taking back the streets” and “picking up guns” were supposed to mean, and whether anyone in that Facebook thread understands that this kind of language gets logged, cross-referenced, and, if it escalates, taken to a judge.

“You gotta take the guns and go after those activists.” — the sentiment, paraphrased. The complaint, filed. The receipt, kept.

The cafe is closed. The lawsuit is pending. The complaint is filed. Keep the receipts.