Jackson 'Avenue of Hearts' angers locals

Michael Jackson's neighbours have had it.

They've put up with months of hoopla surrounding the court proceedings in Santa Maria, in the heart of central California wine country, and they've put up with the fans plying the narrow road to Neverland.

But now the jury has retired, passions on both sides are growing as surely as the tension over the looming verdict. The results have not always been pretty.

Every day this week, the fans have erected an "Avenue of Hearts" comprising tributes and expressions of love along the kilometre or so leading up to Neverland.

And every day a local truck or four-wheel-drive has veered off the road and flattened them.

Some motorists have taken to throwing things, including a raw egg that hit one fan in the chest.

It's not just the fans who are driving the locals to distraction.

The usually idyllic landscape is also crawling with television trucks which shuttle the 50km between Santa Maria and Neverland.

Things get particularly raucous around evening news time, when reporters send out their live feeds and the fans disrupt them by blasting Jackson hits from boomboxes, or setting off their car alarms in unison.

For three months, the trial judge performed an admirable task of making the circus of a trial as un-circus-like as possible.

Now, though, with the eight women and four men of the jury sequestered for six hours a day and no certainty about when they might reach a decision, the circus has moved into a new gear.

Black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have rushed to Jackson's side as if he were a great crusading cause for the civil rights movement.

The former presidential candidate compared the November 2003 police raid on Neverland to search for corroborating evidence of child abuse to the violent and ultimately devastating standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco in 1993.

Najee Ali, a black Muslim leader from Los Angeles, was stopped by police for holding up traffic after he slowed to 8km/h on the highway and paraded a pro-Jackson banner.

TV stations have expressed growing impatience with the jury. Many of them have fond memories of the 42 minutes it took the jury in O.J. Simpson's murder trial to find him not guilty.

But analysts say it is hardly surprising the Santa Maria panel is taking its time to digest all the testimony and the 98 detailed pages of instructions.

- INDEPENDENT