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Another Carl Drega?
KIRKWOOD, Mo. (AP) - A gunman with a history of acrimony against civic leaders stormed City Hall during a council meeting Thursday night, killing two police officers and three city officials before law enforcers fatally shot him, authorities said. The mayor was critically injured in the rampage.
The victims at the meeting in suburban St. Louis were killed after the gunman rushed the council chambers and began firing as he yelled "Shoot the mayor!" according to St. Louis County Police spokeswoman Tracy Panus. Two people were wounded before Kirkwood police fatally shot him, she said.
... the wounded included Mayor Mike Swoboda, who was in critical condition late Thursday in the intensive- care unit of St. John's Mercy Hospital in Creve Coeur...
...[A city hall reporter identified the shooter] as Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, whom she knows from covering the council. Thornton had previously disrupted meetings, she told the Post-Dispatch.
Thornton was well-known at City Hall, often making outrageous comments at public meetings, according to a 2006 article in the weekly Webster- Kirkwood Times.
The newspaper quoted Swoboda as saying in June 2006 that Thornton's contentious remarks over the years created "one of the most embarrassing situations that I have experienced in my many years of public service."
Swoboda's comments came during a council meeting attended by Thornton two weeks after the man was forcibly removed from the chambers. The mayor said at the time that the council considered banning Thornton from future meetings but decided against it.
"The city council has decided that they will not lower themselves to Mr. Thornton's level," Swoboda said at the meeting. "We will act with integrity and continue to deal with him at these council proceedings. However, we will not allow Mr. Thornton, or any other person, to disrupt these proceedings."
Thornton said during the meeting that he had been issued more than 150 tickets.
He was arrested twice and later convicted for disorderly conduct for outbursts at two council meetings in 2006, convinced the city was persecuting him. When allowed to speak during one meeting, he approached the podium with a posterboard with a picture of a donkey and began making harassing remarks about Swoboda.
In a federal lawsuit stemming from those meetings, Thornton, representing himself, insisted that Kirkwood officials violated his constitutional rights to free speech by barring him from speaking at the meetings. But a judge in St. Louis tossed out the suit Jan. 28, writing that "any restrictions on Thornton's speech were reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and served important governmental interests."
Kirkwood is about 20 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis. ...Despite its reputation locally for serenity, Kirkwood has grappled in recent years with crimes that have brought it unwanted attention.
Just down the street from City Hall is the Imo's pizzeria once managed by Michael Devlin, the man who kidnapped Shawn Hornbeck when the boy was just 11 in 2002 and held him for four years before authorities rescued him from the home in January last year. Also rescued was Ben Ownby, another teenager Devlin abducted just days before Devlin's arrest.
... City Hall also is about a block from a park now named for former Kirkwood police Sgt. William McEntee, who was a 43-year-old father of three when he was slain in 2005 by a man who witnesses said blamed police for the death of his 12-year-old half-brother two hours earlier.
You can check the last year’s worth of Kirkwood City Council minutes on the web at http://www.ci.kirkwood.mo.us/meetings/COUNCIL.htm
Have a look, and see how many times public comments from other residents, however petty they may be, are recorded in excruciating detail. And compare that to the number of entries that simply note there were comments made by Charles Thornton, with no details whatsoever. I'm certain it's also no coincidence that whenever Thornton made public comments, he was liste dead-last among the public participants.
It's also noteworthy that the city council enacted a detailed set of rules for public comments last August. By all appearances, the rules were specifically aimed at squelching Thornton. In particular, one rule says that "The Mayor has the right to stop any speaker from making comments on any subject that is not presently pending before the City Council after that speaker has made the comments more than 10 (ten) times cumulatively on the same general topic at prior council meetings." In plain language, this means that they can ignore someone trying to bring up an embarrassing subject until they gain the right to bar him outright from making comments on that matter. Representative government at its best...
There are those among us who can only tolerate being ignored by the governments for so long before committing some violent act that finally gets someone’s attention, and almost always results in multiple deaths.
This is hardly the first time such a thing has happened, and it will surely not be the last, no matter what citizen disarmament laws are enacted.
Whether it is justifiable or forgivable, I will not attempt to argue. But when people feel they are left out of the governing process, or mistreated by government, this can be one of the consequences.
In Thornton’s case, you have to wonder why 150 “tickets” (presumably traffic/parking citations) did not lead to some sort of hearing in which he was afforded the opportunity to air his grievances, and in which some permanent solution to this obviously ongoing problem could have been reached. Even if that solution meant jailing Thornton. One hundred fifty citations, in the absence of any further action by the government, constitutes harrassment.
You ignore someone, or categorize him as a crackpot at your own peril. This has been shown time and again, as Vin Suprynowicz has noted in his books The Ballad of Carl Drega and Send in the Waco Kilers, yet governments never seem to learn anything useful from these violent outbursts.