ORLANDO – When Zane Aparicio plucked a couple pieces of chalk – yellow and green – from a plastic bucket to color in a crosswalk, they ended up handcuffed and in jail.
When they tried to retrieve small Pride flags that an angry driver had yanked up from the sidewalk and thrown in the street, they got kicked in the face.
“I’m literally chalking love over hate,” said Aparicio, who is nonbinary and uses the name Cait Aldebrandt, standing near the crosswalk at the Pulse nightclub site in downtown Orlando.
The kicking incident, part of which was caught on video and is still being investigated by police, has so far been the most violent episode reported since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration ordered that colored markings on streets had to go.
In the three months since the direc