Robert Shorter was a security guard at the worldwide headquarters for Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) in Costa Mesa before being fired several years ago.
So, it was unusual that the 39-year-old Yorba Linda resident would be walking out of the opulent eyesore across from South Coast Plaza after 3 a.m. Sunday.
Police claim Shorter had not only just burglarized the building but that he is responsible for a string of hits to the donation boxes and corporate offices there. Perhaps the devil made him do it.
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Responding to a call of a suspicious man lurking about the facility lorded over by swishy televangelist Paul Crouch and his wigged-and-painted wife, Jan Crouch, police set up a perimeter around the illuminated Grecian nightmare.
Shorter then strolled out at door and toward his car in the parking lot, where cops stopped and arrested him for burglary.
“It appears that he has returned several times since then gaining
access with either a key or access code,” Costa Mesa police Sgt. Patrick Wessel reportedly told the Orange County Register.
Security guards who have not been fired from TBN are now checking video surveillance tapes to determine how often Shorter swang by and how much gold, frankincense and myrrh he may have spirited away.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.