from Mercury News, Aug. 29

• “He was telling me about his voices. And then he said, ‘You know I’ve been to prison, and I don’t masturbate anymore.’ Out of the blue,” she said. “Then he started crying, and she was crying. I was looking at them — what is this about? I got freaked out.”
• To some, he announced plans to give up the printing business and preach full time. Last year, he launched a company, God’s Desire. His blog, called “Voices Revealed,” describes a fascination with mind control and the ability to hear the voices in people’s heads. “The Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world,” he wrote.
• Jim Molino, owner of JM Enterprise, a Pittsburg wrecking yard, said Garrido would give customers bottles of cold water and fuel religious discussions. “He has a vast knowledge of the Bible. He knows the book backwards and forwards,” Molino said.
• Garrido asked to do a sermon at the wrecking yard. “I told him, ‘Hell no,’” Molino said.
• One of the men, William Clark, described a strange display on the dashboard of Garrido’s car. He said religious symbols — including a pentagram — were glued onto the dashboard, along with an array of nude baby dolls. Law enforcement officials did not return calls to confirm the display.
• Occasionally, Garrido would set up speakers on the park’s stage, the men said. “But he never seemed to say anything or play music with them,” said one man, who declined to give his name. “Nothing happened. No sound. I guess he wasn’t quite wired in, either.”
• Garrido asked several people, including customers, to sign testimonials confirming they had witnessed his ability to “control sound with my mind” and a device he developed “for others to witness this phenomena.” About three years ago, he asked Karunaratne to sign one, after insisting the real estate agent put on earphones attached to a box.
• “I did sign it, but I did it just to get away from it. I did not have any intention of endorsing his crazy stuff,” said Karunaratne, who said he saw no signs of the kind of trouble revealed in the past week.
• “I told my wife, ‘This guy seems to be like he’s going crazy. He’s getting into religious extremism,’” he said. “I was not worried about that because I’ve seen people like that. I met his family, and they didn’t have any problem with it.”

from MSNBC, Aug. 29

• Garrido’s own father, Manuel, has a harsher assessment. His son, he says, is “absolutely out of his mind” and he traces his problems to a bad motorcycle accident long ago when he went from a “comical, funny” boy to someone who fell in with the wrong crowd and took LSD.

from Mail Online, Aug.31

• ‘I told my wife, it’s no different to Manson and those girls,’ said Ron, 65, a retired electrician. ‘She was under his spell - a robot. It just seems so bizarre. Crazy, crazy, crazy.’
• Quite so. But listening to Garrido’s deluded attempts to justify Jaycee’s abduction during a rambling radio interview from his prison cell yesterday, and examining his bizarre internet blog, it becomes clear that the likeness to Manson is more than physical.
• Just like the twisted Californian cult leader, he is a dangerously self-absorbed narcissist. And, as with the demented Manson, he is at pains to convince us that he possesses supernatural gifts and uses risible, quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo to mask his depravity.

(Garrido is one f**ked up human being- if he even deserves that title. I wonder, though, who the “wrong crowd” was and what they were actually doing.)