KSDK-TV filed a request to Kirkwood City Hall for, and got, every single citation that Kirkwood ever filed on Cookie Thornton or on his business, CookCo Construction. They then read and studied every single on of those citations, and armed with what they learned, went and asked very pointed questions of Kirkwood city attorney (and Thornton survivor) John Hessel. Based on eyewitness accounts received from Meacham Park, KSDK's reporters went after all of this to try one last time to answer the most important question of the whole tragedy. Were Cookie Thorton, his family, and his neighbors in Meacham Park right to believe that Cookie Thornton was singled out for abusive harassment by the Kirkwood city government?
Their single most interesting finding astounded almost everybody. Only a couple of people actually knew this, I know, but it's so important it blows my mind that nobody brought it up in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. From the story:
"In the past 12 years the City of Kirkwood issued 79 citations to Thornton. ... In 1996, the city issued four citations. In 1997 it was six citations. In 1998 Thornton received only one citation and in 1999 he received two. In that four year period, Thornton paid about 1000 dollars in fines. But in the years 2000 and 2001, the city issued 59 citations to Thornton. ... In May, 2001, a St. Louis County Circuit Court Judge found Thornton guilty of every violation filed. She fined him more than 11,000 dollars. They were fines Thornton never paid. The following month, the tickets increased. On June 22, 2001 Ken Yost, the Director of Public Works, one of five people Thornton killed, personally wrote four tickets. ... Four days later, Thornton received eight more tickets. ... [Then] According to Hessel a decision was made to halt all tickets. ... Public records show, in 2003, 2004, and 2005, Kirkwood did not issue one ticket to Thornton. Since 2002, he received a total of six citations." (Emphasis added by me.)In an on-air interview, Hessel gave ambiguous and conflicting answers about why the harassment started, whether it was initiated by the city on their own first, or if the city was only responding to complaints from one or more of Thornton's neighbors. But unless they can show even one white contractor in Kirkwood who was treated the same way when he didn't immediately pack up his business and leave town, they still have something important left to explain, because the evidence is clear and unambiguous: for a span of roughly one year, the city of Kirkwood, and specifically one of Thornton's targets that night Public Works Director Ken Yost, absolutely was trying to put him out of business in an over-the-top campaign of harassment.
If it were anybody else, I'd be willing to believe it was just a personality conflict. These things happen. Some local official shows up on a guy's property, makes an impolite demand, makes threats, the guy who's being threatened loses all ability to think rationally (which is what happens when you threaten people), both people end up shouting at each other, and they declare informal war. It happens. What I'm having a hard time imagining, though, is that this is what happened with Cookie Thornton, because of one thing that literally everybody who knew him has said: before this all started, Thornton was the nicest, most sweet-tempered, most generous, kindest guy in all of Meacham Park. Someone who got along with everybody, black or white, young or old, rich or poor. So if that initial attempt to get Thornton to clean up his business enough to get the neighbors to shut up, and to get the necessary permits and variances, resulted in the kind of all-out war that those citations document, that initial meeting has to have been disastrous. And this being Kirkwood, and this being Meacham Park, I still think the most obvious explanation why, all the way back in 2000 this one Meacham Park businessman got (apparently) singled out so hard is that he was a black man with a semi-successful business, and some racist white official felt that he didn't need to negotiate with, discuss anything with, or defend anything to a black man, that when a white government official speaks, it is up to the black man to shut up, grovel, and obey. If there's another reason instead, the burden of proof is on Kirkwood to show it.
But the last and most fascinating part of this is this, as I emphasized above from Zigman's story: Kirkwood had already backed down. At least, most of the way. We know that they were still refusing to negotiate the permits and variances Thornton technically needed, because plenty of witnesses have told reporters about Thornton's increasingly desperate attempts over the years to get onto the necessary City Council or City Zoning Commission meeting agendas. And because Thornton's credit records are protected by privacy laws, we may never know if the City of Kirkwood was still trying to collect on the tens of thousands of dollars of fines from back then, or if six years later those unpaid fines were still wrecking his credit rating. Maybe that's something the city never thought of, never realized how badly that would hurt a small businessman when they decided to de-escalate. As far as Hessel and the city were concerned, when they stopped writing those tickets altogether in the summer of 2001, this should have been all over, and Thornton shouldn't have had anything left to complain about.
Is that why Thornton pinned all of his hopes on his lawsuits against Kirkwood and crashed so hard when the last lawsuit was dismissed, because he saw it as the only way to repair his credit when the city was refusing to discuss it with him? Or is this really just pent-up rage that simmered all these years in the mind of a man who was convinced that he did everything that white America has ever asked anybody to do, festering anger six and a half years later over an insult he was given for being a semi-successful black man? We'll probably never know. I guess that all we can know is that whatever the heck was going on in 2000 and 2001, why ever a handful of Kirkwood's elected officials took on this one popular Meacham Park former star athlete and semi-successful small businessman, whoever actually started it, they and he paid for it with their lives. Whether or not Kirkwood stays at war with Meacham Park, Cookie Thornton's private war is finally over.
(Previously: "Meacham Park Terrorist's Suicide Attack on Kirkwood City Occupation Government," 2/8/08. "Kirkwood and Meacham Park from 1853 to 1990," 2/10/08. "Ethnic Cleansing Does Not Condone Terrorism: Kirkwood, Meacham Park, and Cookie Thornton," 2/11/08.)
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bradhicks- J. Brad Hicks
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Strawman?
I have had people tell me that electing Obama means that black people can't complain about racism anymore. So I'm not sure what, exactly, you're trying to say here.
and then you said: "I have had people tell me that electing Obama means that black people can't complain about racism anymore. "
Shutting up black people != fixing racism.
Officer Down: Sergeant William Biggs - 02/08/2008
[Kirkwood, Missouri]
Officer Down: Police Officer Tom Ballman - 02/08/2008
[Kirkwood, Missouri]
http://www.policeone.com/officer-down/1
http://www.policeone.com/officer-down/1
I found this article telling: http://www.policeone.com/law-enforcemen
"2008: Another Terrible Year?"
By Dave Smith
Street Survival Seminar Senior Instructor
For a brief period last year there was a series of articles in the media attending to the fact that 2007 was about to be a horrific year for law enforcement, then it was mostly forgotten by those outside of the profession. The year ended with an approximate total of 181 law enforcement deaths due to assaults and accidents. The real issue for us was whether we needed to take action or write the year off as an aberration, a weird series of bad events where the cards of life dealt us one bad hand after another?
Well, the deaths aren’t abating and the reasons aren’t changing. We are dying at an accelerating rate due to assaults and accidents. The trends match last years with multiple officers’ deaths due to assaults and males disproportionally dying in numbers that predate all our safety gear, high retention holsters, and air bags! The average experience of the dead is around 10 years, and their age is in the mid-thirties; this has been the one constant regardless of the total of law enforcement officers killed…our “deadly bell curve!”
LAPD SWAT, who I had the pleasure of training with decades ago, just lost their first officer. Kirkwood, Missouri just lost two of our brothers and a part of their city government in an armed assault over citations! Mall shootings, school shootings, off-duty killings, standoffs, all these are not unusual in our society, but the sheer violence and toll has increased dramatically; was Virginia Tech a warning to us all and has law enforcement responded properly?
I wasn't even remotely paranoid - I was dead-on (so to speak):
http://damiana-swan.livejournal.com/459
http://www.star-telegram.com/667/st
Apparently by Executive directive, the Secret Service has been dropping weapons screenings at Obama rallies.
"Just because you're paranoid/ Don't mean they're not after you."
What they seem to be doing, as a way of balancing costs against risks, is betting that once you get out past effective hand-gun range, their dozens of crowd watchers will see you clearing a gun and bringing it into line in plenty of time to get the candidate out of the line of fire. And, in their defense, it seems to have worked, so far.
But yeah. As I said in a comment in
If a sports arena can screen 15-30 thousand people in the hour or so before a game starts, the Secret Service should be able to figure out how to do the same thing. Particularly since they are apparently perfectly capable of screening Democrats out of Bush rallies, even to the point of arresting them if they try to get in.
As you yourself have been pointing out, Brad, racism takes all forms, from white-sheet wearing to malign neglect. And considering that Obama has been fielding death threats since Day One (*) - that said threats are, in fact, the reason for the Secret Service's presence at those rallies - it's hard to for me to feel that this is not an example of the latter.
PS: One maker and promoter of said death threats is rock psycho Ted "Free for All" Nugent. Wango-tango indeed!
---------------------------
* = http://www.openentrance.com/2007/05/0
Firstly, Thornton's personal experiences with Kirkwood are far more intertwined with the 'ethnic cleansing' strip-mall project than you write. He was well known as being one of the development's most vocal proponents in his neighborhood, and his overextension of business capacity and failure to actually acquire the necessary revenue increases are what directly lead to his half-million dollar bankruptcy in 1999. The subsequent loss of his vehicle storage property (and purportedly quasi-legal dumping grounds) are what forced him into using his neighborhood as an impromptu parking lot and junk yard, causing the ensuing citations. While a conspiracist interpretation might be that the city of Kirkwood somehow used Thornton to grease the wheels for the project and then betrayed him, I consider it equally likely that he could have just been a greedy and incompetent businessman who fell over himself to sell out his neighborhood and who got badly burned in the process.
No matter what the case, by mid 2001, the man whom Kirkwood was either harassing or reprimanding was a failed entrepreneur who could be legitimately singled out for the state of his home and business ownership. According even to the PDFs in your linked article, he was at the time of his first assault:
* Using a driveway paving permit for a nearby house issued six months prior.
* For an owner believed to have moved out of the region and who could not be located.
* To store in the yard and on the curb, tractor trailers and dump trucks.
To all appearances, he had been engaging in prolonged fraud to salvage his business and was being ticketed instead of charged criminally. Thornton had chased Yost away earlier that day from an attempt to take photographic evidence for the four prior citations, leading to the next encounter with the backup officer whose presence you call a rationale-destroying threat. The Kirkwood government's fines were still strong against a failing businessman, but they were almost patronizing in light of what its figures knew. I strongly suspect that many of these sort of government matters, and much of the private aid from 'old' Kirkwood to Meacham, are done with the condescending "White Man's Burden" racist mentality rather than Thornton's accused malicious "plantation" form.
It is impossible for any smart, sane individual to suspect that belligerent noncompliance and harassing/attacking city employees would end well, and this incident took place well before the vast majority of the city's perceived wrongs against him. I argue that Thornton had been in bad state of mind for almost all of the eight years after his bankruptcy and could have been "destroyed" through criminal charges for one of his assaults, had there actually been any jealousy-inspiring success left to erase at that point. His refusal to accept forgiveness from the fines without a full public apology was a delirious mistake that lead him to his later $12 and then $15 million lawsuits. Thornton had a divorce and then a separation from two women both known to have told him to back down from his pursuits against the city. It is unlikely that they left because they felt that Kirkwood was oppressing them beyond their endurance.
(continued...)
What little I have left to say is in defense of two of the three explicitly targeted slain individuals, Karr and Yost. Connie Karr was a council member and mayoral candidate who was perhaps the most outspoken advocate in Kirkwood of adopting a ward structure, for the purpose of giving Meacham a guaranteed seat in the government. A Meacham resident who loved his neighborhood and wanted to give it its own voice could not have chosen a worse ally to assassinate. Ken Yost, though possibly a bureaucrat in his office, was perhaps one of the least racially judgmental in the entire Kirkwood public sphere. In the last few years, he and his wife had done repeated, extensive volunteer cleanup and repair missions for Katrina victims and had up until the week before his death been their church's leaders in helping war refugees just out of Burundi. To target an ailing Kirkwood for longstanding clumsy and patronizing racial relations in more than merited, but maligning on speculation the character of some very admirable individuals is reckless. Casual association of their names with the plotting of loathsome racial destruction in really beyond the pale.
I agree that there has been a shameful amount of anti-African racism in our nation's and region's past and cheer attempts to better understand it and undo some of its legacy, but there are not necessarily conspiracies behind every corner nor was Charles Thornton undoubtedly a martyr, or even a man actually being wronged in objective reality. I argue that a loud delusion of persecution hurts those actually tormented, and there has already been too much ignorance and misinformation to eschew caution. Of neighbors, Cookie had managed to elicit enough stolen sympathy, as most of them "had no idea the city only issued six citations since 2002," as reported in the penultimate line of the new article. I welcome more debate of the topic, though I will never have an easy time with this particular case in pitying a man who strikes me as having been an unstable and violent murderer.
-Jeff
Or even superior to the other black folks.
God bless and keep you Cookie. You join the other American martyrs who gave their lives for our freedom.