He’s a hometown boy, affectionately known as Dr. A and admired for his robust personality. Like many in La Mesa, he’s struggling to regain his footing after a tumultuous summer.
Mayor Mark Arapostathis, a hefty man with a resonant voice and deep roots in La Mesa, could often be seen tooling around the East County city in his golf cart, waving hello and stopping to chat with residents and business owners.
He was the one who tapped the keg at the popular La Mesa Oktoberfest, emceed concerts and movies at local parks and led a youth theater group while teaching at La Mesa Arts Academy in the same district where he went to school.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic in March, followed two months later by the social justice movement, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a White Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s death on May 25 triggered worldwide protests, some of which turned violent, including in La Mesa, leaving the region shaken and relations strained between longtime friends.
It also sorely tested the mayor’s leadership. Arapostathis, 54, acknowledges that this year’s been tough.
“I have my moments, I’m not going to lie,” he said last week, sitting in the spacious room where he teaches theater. “But in our world, unfortunately, it’s seen as a weakness. So as the mayor, I don’t want anyone to think that I’m looking for excuses or sympathy, so I try to be honest and say, I’m struggling just like everyone else is struggling.”
Arapostathis is still trying to reconcile the events that occurred that May weekend with the place he’s always called home, where he played football in high school, volunteered on city commissions and eventually won election as mayor in 2014, soundly defeating longtime Mayor Art Madrid.
He said he watched in horror the night of May 30 and early morning of May 31 as his bank and two other buildings burned, and as looters smashed store windows throughout the city, stealing jewelry, sporting goods, electronic items, snack foods and hair products.
“I was crushed,” he said. “My heart was absolutely crushed because this is the city that I grew up in, that I feel is part of me. It was as if a part of my body was being burned and being damaged, and it was something I knew would never fully grow back. It’s going to be something that I live with and that everyone in the city of La Mesa is going to live with for the rest of their lives. It was incredibly difficult to watch. I’m a resident here, too, and I was going through the same type of emotions as everyone else.”
Arapostathis said the City Council met at 11 p.m. Saturday, May 30, at the La Mesa Community Center to discuss the situation. Two hours later, Greg Humora — six months into his new role as city manager and acting director of emergency and disaster for the city — ordered a curfew from 1:30 a.m. until 7 a.m. Sunday, May 31.
Other curfews followed as the city tried to repair the damage, boarding up broken windows that later became canvases for local artists who painted flowers, rainbows and words of healing.
Some in the city have criticized the City Council for not acting more swiftly and forcefully to put an end to the chaos. “No one had anticipated for this event to turn the way that it did,” Arapostathis said. “At 5 p.m., we didn’t fully realize what was going to happen later in the evening.”
“I’m not a police officer and I’m not going to pretend to be one, so for me to speculate on what could have been done, I can’t,” he said. “I do understand why people are speculating, but until you are the person that has command and control, you really don’t know what else could be done. I talked to someone who was angry the buildings burned down. I said, ‘I’m angry, too. I have questions, too.’”
Arapostathis said firefighters were unable to respond to the arson because a state policy says “that unless the team of firefighters can be protected, they can’t be dispatched to a situation where there are hundreds of rioters, and we only had so many uniformed officers that night that could ensure their safety.”
In the weeks following the mayhem, the mayor appeared visibly shaken and struggled to find words. His council colleagues quietly expressed concern for his emotional state.
City Councliman Bill Baber said he knows the events have deeply affected Arapostathis — or “Mr. La Mesa,” as Baber calls him.
“Mark is incredibly empathetic,” Baber said. “And Mark loves La Mesa. He feels La Mesa in his bones and all of it hurts him — the complaints, the bitterness, the riots, the racial strife. It’s been a tough year for all of us. It hurts us all, but it has hurt no one more than Mark.
“He was overwhelmed, disheartened, tired and angry, and really, we all were,” Baber said. “He was rattled because La Mesa was rattled. People in the community questioned his ability, and he received endless amounts of unfair criticism, and he took it to heart. He was like the embodiment of all that pain — and while we were all rattled, it particularly got to him.
“It was like a death in his family to have La Mesa wounded like that. He wasn’t the same. And somebody might look at that as a weakness, but it was all real and it was true. He is a person who cares, who has empathy and who feels the pain of an entire city.”
Several business owners in the city said they are frustrated that more wasn’t done to protect them during the rioting, but they don’t fault the mayor or police department. One business owner in the city for nearly four decades said she is disappointed at the lack of concern by the city in the aftermath of COVID-19 and then the rioting.
“Nobody from the city has approached me for months,” said Deanne Ross, who owns a clothing store in downtown La Mesa. “Nobody has checked on me, not even a phone call to see how we’re doing. It’s like they hid. I feel like there’s outreach they can do. As an elected official, I feel like (Arapostathis) should act like a mayor and show some leadership.”
Brenda Leek, who owns a restaurant downtown, said the city’s lack of communication has been anything but reassuring in the middle of a pandemic. She said she has told Arapostathis “to his face that I’m disappointed with the lack of concern I feel he has with businesses.”
“It’s kind of a shame,” she said. “I respect the energy and efforts he has given in the past, but the year 2020 he has been MIA.”
Among the accusations made against him, Arapostathis said one of the most frustrating is people’s belief that he ordered the La Mesa Police Department to “stand down,” allowing the mayhem to continue unabated, which he said “is completely erroneous.” A timeline provided by the city noted that the San Diego County Sheriff’s deputies took over command control later in the evening.
Then-Police Chief Walt Vasquez — who would later announce his retirement — on several occasions denied that there had been any direction from the mayor or city manager for public safety members to stand down.
Arapostathis said he is still trying to dispel rumors that police officers were taken off duty to personally guard him, and explained that while public safety officials did check on the safety of all City Council members during the night’s events, that was the extent of it.
“I wasn’t in contact with the police chief,” he said. “Never was I ever one-on-one with the police chief. I was not on the phone. I was never at the police station monitoring the situation ordering people what to do.”
Because La Mesa is a California “General Law” city, mayors and council members “have all of the responsibility but have none of the authority” where the police department’s activity is concerned, Arapostathis explained. In a General Law city, the city manager has the authority to hire and fire a police chief; the City Council hires and can fire the city manager. The city manager, however, does not have the authority to tell the police department what to do; that responsibility of making the calls on public safety falls on the chief of police.
In June, the police department provided a timeline and accompanying incident account of the weekend’s activities. Since then, the city has hired an outside firm to provide an “after-action report” of the demonstration and destruction, and to look into what happened leading to the protest and related events that happened afterward.
Arapostathis said he answered as many emails and texts as he could.
“I had the same questions and I know that they were puzzled, because I’m the mayor and they feel that I have total control of every situation that occurs in the city of La Mesa, especially something of this magnitude,” Arapostathis said. “And I don’t. And it’s hard to say that it was out of control and it was beyond what we could handle.”
Arapostathis said he left social media in June, discouraged by the calls for his resignation and the death threats.
“What was most troubling to me is when I saw people that disagreed on small issues with people that had been their friends, and they wanted to destroy that person,” he said.
Because the pandemic closed schools, he’s been unable to take refuge at his favorite place, his theater room. As he walked around an eerily quiet campus earlier last week, Arapostathis said he misses the flurry of activity, even the lines for the bathroom.
His fellow educators have tried to ease his mind.
“Mark is a home-grown person who loves this town and has for more than 50 years,” said Beth Thomas, principal at La Mesa Arts Academy and a longtime colleague. “Everybody loves him. He was devastated by the impact (of the riots) on this town.”
In an act of solidarity, Thomas and other colleagues arranged for a surprise drive-by parade for Arapostathis in June. While he was with Thomas at the campus, dozens of cars drove by honking their horns, thrusting up signs and shouting words of support. People parked their cars and went up to visit him, socially distanced and with masks, Thomas said.
“He sobbed for 90 minutes,” she said.
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Five months later, La Mesa mayor still grapples with riot's aftermath - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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