lbuxx's Blog

Gunman opens fire in KirkwoodFrom staff reportsST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH02/08/2008

An armed man walked into a Kirkwood city council meeting Thursday night and shot several people, including the at least one police officer, the city’s mayor and several council members.

At least one city council woman is dead and others are being treated for serious injuries at a hospital.

A correspondent for the Post-Dispatch who was attending said the 7 p.m. meeting had just started — the mayor was starting the meeting just after the Pledge of Allegiance — when the man rushed into the council chambers yelling and began opening fire with at least one weapon. She identified the man as Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, a man she knows from covering the council.

"He came from the back of the room," said Janet McNichols, the correspondent. "He kept something about, ‘Shoot the mayor’ and he just walked around shooting anybody he could."

McNichols said the shooter first fired at Tom Ballman, a police officer at the meeting. She said she looked up to see the officer shot in the head.

Thornton then targeted Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, who was sitting in front of McNichols. He was also hit in the head, she said.

 

"After that, I was on my stomach under the chairs," she said. "I laid on my stomach waiting to get shot. Oh God, it was a horror."

McNichols said Thornton continued to yell about the mayor, and from his voice and the gunshots, she could tell he had approached the dais at the front of the room where the council sits behind a semicircular desk.

At some point he fired at City Attorney John Hessel, who told McNichols he fended the attacker off by throwing chairs. She saw Hessel later, appearing uninjured except for a knot on his head.

Among those hit, in addition to Ballman and Yost, were Mayor Mike Swoboda, and council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr, McNichols said. Conditions were not known for any of them.

RELATED LINK Thornton battled city council in past

Then police officers burst into the room and there was more yelling, McNichols said. First, Thornton saying he had a gun, she said. Then gunshots and the officers saying they’d got him.

McNichols said about 30 people were in the council chambers at the time of the shooting. Witnesses were herded into offices while police secured the scene. Later they were taken to the police station to be interviewed.

Thornton was not a stranger to the council, where he was often a contentious presence. In May 2006, he was handcuffed and pulled from a meeting. He was charged with disorderly conduct and released.

McNichols said he often aimed his ire at the mayor and at Yost.

Late last month, a federal judge in St. Louis dismissed a lawsuit in which Thornton, representing himself, claimed Kirkwood officials violated his free speech rights by prohibiting him from speaking out at meetings.

In a ruling Jan. 28, U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry took into account that Thornton had twice been convicted of disorderly conduct for disrupting meetings in 2006 with off-point complaints about persecution by officials.

"He came to many, many meetings and always said terrible things to the mayor," McNichols remmebered. "He’d come to the meeting and he’d have a big easel and a picture. a donkey on there and call the council asses."

Sportscaster Doug Vaughn of Channel 4 told that station that he went to Kirkwood High School with Thornton and saw him through the years. He said Thornton’s behavior changed after police cracked down on his parking of vehicles for his construction company outside his home in Meacham Park. He felt harassed, Vaughn said.

"He could not have been a nicer guy to those who knew them but I think this problem with the city drove him completely crazy," Vaughn said in the TV interview.

City Hall is at 139 Kirkwood Road. Three blocks surrounding it were quickly cordoned off as dozens of police cars, firetrucks and ambulances from other districts, including Normandy, Eureka and Des Peres, poured in to help.

Even an hour after the shootings, ambulances and fire rescue vehicles were still arriving at the scene.

Media were kept about three blocks from the scene.

Dotti Durban and her husband, Mike, had planned to attend the City Council meeting to learn about an idea to rezone an area near Manchester and Lindbergh but she got held up at work.

She was met by dozens of police cars as she drove to city hall in hopes of catching part of the meeting.

"Lucky for us that we weren’t at that meeting," Durban said.