Services were canceled at Beachcities Community Church in Huntington Beach on Sunday morning following a bomb threat, which is ironic when you consider what happened by coincidence the same day in nearby Garden Grove.
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The best thing about the Orange County Register's online coverage of the bomb threat was not the main story, which was rather routine. A churchgoer received the threat via a text message from an unknown phone number around 9 a.m., prompting Huntington Beach Police to search the buildings and grounds at 9872 Hamilton St. for about an hour without finding any explosives.
Just below the Register story was a link to this, which was either auto-generated or placed there by an eagle-eyed editor:
“Orange County religious leaders say places of worship must be free of violence”
That's about a previously scheduled Sunday afternoon gathering at Christ Cathedral (formerly Crystal Cathedral), where Orange County Catholic, Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders endorsed a statement of principle that said houses of worship and the people inside them should never be targets for violent acts.
Sounds like someone was working in mysterious ways.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.