Repent Amarillo: Giving business the business – Part 3 video and UPDATED story

By George Schwarz

The Amarillo Independent

Phillip and Debbie Roark drive a Yellow Cab and said Repent Amarillo had called their boss to complain they were swingers. David Grisham, the head of Repent Amarillo, said he called only to prevent drunk driving.

But Repent Amarillo doesn’t stop at trying to hurt their incomes, the Roarks said.

Some of the activities border on physical intimidation, they said.

Repent Amarillo comes to the swingers club to shine lights in taxi cab drivers’ eyes when they pull up to the club to drop passengers off, Phillip Roark said. “They are intentionally flashing cameras, spotlights, trying to blind people, trying to blind drivers.”

Several weeks ago the owner of Yellow Cab drove the Roarks to the club and he hit a trash bin as a result of the lights blinding him, Debbie Roark said.

Phillip Roark said Grisham also tries to provoke people. Russell Grisham pushed a camera in his face and he slapped it away. Repent called the police, claiming an assault, but no further action was taken.

Grisham said Roark has an assault charge pending for the incident.

Russell Grisham was 30 feet away and Roark walked over to Russell and “smacked the video camera on both sides with his hands and it jammed into my son’s face.”

Repent Amarillo calls the police when they get assaulted because he doesn’t want to give the impression it’s OK to assault them, Grisham said. “We live by the laws and we expect others to live by the laws, too.”

An incident report was filed and the case is under investigation, said Amarillo Police Cpl. Jerry Neufeld Dec. 1.

Phillip Roark said David Grisham and others have told the Roarks that the videos Repent Amarillo are taking will be placed on the Internet to publicize that they are swingers, threatening to “ruin” him.

But on Nov. 30, Grisham said that if he were out to ruin people or shame them, he’d post the videos they take on the Repent Amarillo Web site.

Repent Amarillo has not affected their business directly, but has been a nuisance, said Michael Hughes, the manager of Bodega’s and Le Chateau.

“They typically will hang out in front of our doors, on the sidewalks, and stop our customers before they come in, handing them pamphlets, asking them about their religion and their faith,” he said.

It’s not clear if they are taking a position against drinking or night life in general. Polk Street now has a variety of businesses, including restaurants, dance clubs and a variety of entertainment. He’s not sure if Repent Amarillo considers people who are out on a Saturday night to be ungodly or not saved, he said.

People are coming into the club and throwing away the pamphlets Repent Amarillo has given them and mocking the group, Hughes said. “I think what they’re doing out there is hurting their actual message.”

Even if Repent Amarillo hasn’t hurt Bodega’s and Le Chateau, it almost ruined a local theater company.

Sirc Michaels, who heads the Avenue 10 Theater, blamed Repent Amarillo for calling city officials, who inspected the building the performance group was using on 10th Avenue and found it to be out of compliance with building codes. Avenue 10 remains without a permanent location.

The theater group had planned to put off any more plays until it could find a permanent home, Michaels said, including canceling “A Midsummer Night’s Nude” originally planned to be a November performance.

But David Grisham’s request to the Amarillo City Commission to bar the presentation before it opened was impetus for putting on the play in October, Michaels said. “It became clear to us that we had to do the show. We were essentially obligated to because if we didn’t, first of all, that group would then claim it as a victory.”

He didn’t want Repent Amarillo to claim such a victory as they had when they shut down the original theater site, he said.

Grisham, in his Nov. 30 interview, said Repent had nothing to do with shutting down the original theater venue, although they were happy to take the blame at the time. They did, he claimed, monitor the swingers from September 2008 until January 2009, when they went public with the “witnessing.” And, he said, they shut the swingers club building for five months.

Michaels said when a group labels itself as Christian in a conservative town like Amarillo, people here take that at face value and give Repent Amarillo credibility even if it is spreading misinformation, as it has about Avenue 10, Michaels said. “It creates an image problem.”

It is a business, he added.

On Oct. 13, Repent Amarillo was outside the swingers club location where Avenue 10 performed “A Midsummer Night’s Nude.” The APD officers, however, kept the group quiet and restricted the protesters to the public sidewalk.

Grisham said his objections to the play were artistic and moral.

As a fan of Shakespeare who has read all the plays, he said none was written to be performed in the nude. Taking a high-class piece of art and making it nude is akin to drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

“I mean, if he had done those plays in the nude in his day, he would have been hung,” Grisham said.

Putting naked people on the stage for a show not written that way and charging for it is akin to running a strip club and using art as a guise. He has moral objections to strip clubs as an impetus to fornication. Further, the city should have regulated the play as an adult business, he said.

Mickey Winks, co-owner of Furrbies, said part of the problem is that Repent Amarillo “pops up sporadically and harasses customers who come downtown.”

He and his business partner chose downtown because revitalization was “in full force.”

“And they just kind of scare people away,” he said. “Who wants to come downtown and enjoy an evening at a restaurant when you never know if these people are going to be there standing in front of a business harassing people as they go in?”

They’ve never shown up in front of his restaurant, but they have threatened to, he added. “They’re not keeping the economy alive. They’re just trying to scare people away from the downtown area.”

How far would Repent Amarillo go in its spiritual warfare?

Violence is strictly over the line, Grisham said, adding the line is drawn in the Bible.

Jesus could be very calm, loving and gentle, but he could also be fierce. He used very strong language in his confrontation with the Pharisees, he said.

“When you confront hypocrisy and evil, you’ve got to remember something. The devil is out to kill us all. He’s out to send every one of us to hell.”

Grisham said he is willing to confront evil even if it costs him his personal reputation; he sees any backlash as part of the persecution the Bible predicts for true believers.

Evidence presented Friday at a peace bond request from the owners of the Sixth Avenue property before Precinct 1 Justice of the Peace Debbie Horn didn’t give her enough evidence to rule against Repent Amarillo. But the religious group came close to being an imminent threat and may have undertaken illegal activity that was out of her jurisdiction, Horn said.

“A peace bond requires a specific threat, an imminent threat,” said David Kemp, assistant Potter County attorney.

Checkered Past

The Repent Amarillo member with a criminal history is Russell Grisham, David Grisham’s son.

Russell Grisham was arrested April 19, 2006, for breach of computer security, according to records from the Amarillo Police Department.

The extensive notes in the police file state that on March 9, 2006, the Amarillo Independent School District reported “In the past few weeks at Caprock HS someone has gotten into the computer system and deleted files from the teachers about the students.”

The same report states two teachers and an assistant principal got an e-mail making light of their computer problems and telling the district how to fix the intrusion.

The next day, APD declared the case inactive, but two weeks later Caprock officials contacted the police to let them know they had a suspect.

According to the police report, Russell Grisham used his own student ID number to hack the system.

When confronted with the evidence that district technology staffers had compiled, he confessed to deleting a variety of files on several occasions so he didn’t have to do his school work. On March 26, 2006, the school’s assistant principal requested that charges be filed for $1,153 worth of damage to the system.

According to the police report, although the Randall County District Attorney accepted a charge of breach of computer security on April 7, 2006, and assigned a docket number, less than three weeks later, the charges were dismissed.

Randall County records, however, showed some legal action was taken. Those filings of April 5, 2006, show Russell Grisham turned himself in to the Randall County Sheriff’s department and posted bail of $1,500 with Bargain Bail Bonds.

The disposition was April 10, 2006, and he was placed on deferred adjudication for one year. The order to discharge him from probation occurred on May 9, 2007.

In a recording of Russell Grisham, David Grisham and the club’s attorney, with car noise in the background, both of the Grishams bragged about the younger man’s “cracking” computers at Caprock and about his other computer skills.

But that incident was in high school, Russell Grisham said. “I wasn’t saved. I wasn’t serving the Lord.”

David Grisham acknowledged Russell Grisham’s record and insisted that his son knows the law now and doesn’t break it.

John “Big John” Leinen, who is now active with Repent Amarillo and videographed the Nov. 30 interview, said he used to be a Crip.

He said that while growing up in Amarillo he was part of a Baptist church that had the “once saved, always saved belief.” That meant to him that you could do what you wanted as long as you believed in Jesus and went to church on Sunday.

“I got involved in gangs when I was 8 years old,” he said, adding he was always big and gangs picked him up. “I’ve had a history of drug-dealing, you name it, fornication, alcoholism. I was a full-time alcoholic when I was 11 years old.”

His parents didn’t pay much attention to him and his grandmother never rebuked him for his lifestyle because she was in the “once saved, always saved” church.

He figured he could do all those things during the week as long as he went to church on Sunday.

When he was 9, his grandmother died a horrible death from brain tumors and his mother had spurned God. This was before he started selling drugs, he explained.

But he said he would change if his mother went back to the church. At age 21, he came in and out of the blue his mother asked him if he wanted to go to church because she was going to be a child’s godmother.

“I had actually heard a voice. You can’t really explain it when you hear this. You can’t tell if it’s coming from your head, your heart, your ear,” he said. “I know nobody else heard it.”

The voice reminded him of his promise, but he declined.

While she was in church, the pastor said someone there had back problems.

It was his mother, who had complained of back pain, and when she went to the front of the church for healing, her back was cured, he said.

After his mother told him the story, he was hit by emotion and began crying – probably for the first time in 10 years. He now knows it was the Holy Spirit.

He said a pastor gave him a scripture that drove home the lesson that it wasn’t right to be a gang-banger during the week and believe going to church on Sunday saves you.

He has been doing ministry ever since, he said.

Repent Amarillo plans

In a recording provided to The Amarillo Independent, in which members of Repent Amarillo were talking to the club’s lawyer, they also bragged about their legal prowess and said they were going to draft an ordinance to bring before the Amarillo City Commission that would outlaw “on-premise sex clubs” in Amarillo to “get this club banned.”

And, according to the Route66 Swingers Club Web site, which Repent Amarillo took over, “We will continue to Show up for any parties held to reach out to the lost and stand up for righteousness in Amarillo.”

In the past, Grisham has said it was right for Repent Amarillo to be intolerant, but Winks said they go too far.

When you question what Repent Amarillo is doing, they call you intolerant, Winks said.

“Repent Amarillo is a fanatical group that is escalating and trying to provoke violence to get themselves publicized,” Phillip Roark said.