Welcome back to another exciting installment of This Week in Starbucks Crime, in which we catalog the bad acts occurring at Starbucks’ 16,000-odd worldwide locations over the past seven days, as well as the week’s fallout from prior Starbucks-related misdeeds. This week we are feeling California, and, by a happy coincidence, so are our Starbucks criminals. So let’s join them, shall we?***We begin this week in San Diego, where we catch up with one of the more inscrutable Starbucks criminals to appear in these pages. The 58-year-old Dennis Christopher Lee was visiting his local Starbucks in June when he threw a cup of early-90’s-McDonald’s-coffee-hot water at the young woman who only moments earlier had provided it to him free of charge, causing her second-degree burns. Why had he done this?Image sourceNot the same Christopher Lee, but you get the idea.Yes, the woman had told him that he, as a non-paying non-customer, was not entitled to the condiments to which he was helping himself, and this clearly was not a message he was on board with. But the anger!This week, Lee gave us a key to unlocking the inner-workings of his mind. He was in court, having pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of assault. The judge found him guilty — Lee’s was a bench trial — and, according to the LA Times, offered him probation. Instead, Lee, who is homeless, said he’d much prefer a year in jail. To which he was then sentenced. Just one more data point and we’d be willing to label Lee’s recent seeming irrational decision-making a trend! (By which we mean to say, perhaps he is crazy.)***If there is a news-you-can-use takeaway from the above item, it is that one can expect to receive, upon request, a free cup of water from one’s local Starbucks. As we travel up the California coast to San Jose, however, we learn that such is not always, allegedly, the case. As a 30-year-old pregnant woman named Michelle Hillaert wrote in a letter published in the San Jose Mercury News on July 24th, she and her equally pregnant pal stood waiting in line at a local Starbucks for at least 15 minutes before being denied their requested free cups of water. They were forced to instead go to a nearby Safeway to sate their complementary water yearnings.”What has happened to basic human kindness?” lamented Hillaert.Hillaert’s was no normal letter to the editor. Instead it was a letter to the Merc’s Action Line, which soon extracted this response from the coffee purveyor:”Requiring customers to make a purchase before providing them with water is not a company policy. We’re very sorry to hear these customers had a negative experience in one of our stores.”So there you have it: the water is on them. Just don’t throw it on them!***And now, capping off our all-California week, we travel to American Canyon, the Napa County subdivision town where on July 23 at about six in the evening a couple of men who were holding hands outside a local Safeway were allegedly accosted by a pair of boys shouting homophobic slurs at them. As the bigoted bullies taunted, threatened and challenged the couple to a fight, the gays sought refuge in their local Starbucks on American Canyon Road, where they called police. Image sourceAmercan Canyon cops were equal to the task of putting the pair of alleged pint-sized penis-on-penis haters in their placeThe cops arrested the alleged little shitheads, charging the older one, 15, with making felony criminal threats and for interfering with civil rights, which is a hate crime. The younger one, for whom no age was provided, was not charged due to the smallness of his age-number.***That’s it for this week. Until next time, soft us now, and be all our sins remember’d!Follow The Daily Weekly on Facebook and Twitter.