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Gunman Had A Turbulent Relationship With City Officials

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By CHERYL WITTENAUER, The Associated Press

Published: February 9, 2008

KIRKWOOD, Mo. - Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton always seemed to be fighting City Hall.

Even before he shot and killed five people at a City Council meeting, thousands of dollars in parking tickets and citations piled up against the asphalt company owner. He raged at meetings over the years that he was being persecuted, mocking city officials and accusing them of having a racist "plantation mentality."

His outbursts at the meetings got him arrested twice on disorderly conduct charges. He filed a free speech lawsuit against the St. Louis suburb, but lost the case last month.

Thursday night, he left his home and headed to one more City Council meeting, carrying a loaded gun. On his bed, his younger brother said, he left a note that read: "The truth will come out in the end."

Before he was shot to death by police, Thornton, 52, killed two policemen, Tom Ballman and William Biggs; council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr; and Director of Public Works Kenneth Yost.
Mayor Mike Swoboda was hospitalized in critical condition with gunshot wounds, and a newspaper reporter covering the meeting, Todd Smith of Suburban Journals, was in satisfactory condition.

Officer Was Shot First

Residents of Kirkwood, about 20 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis, gathered at a prayer vigil Friday at the United Methodist Church, where a bell tolled six times - once for each of the dead.

"This is such an incredible shock to all of us. It's a tragedy of untold magnitude," Deputy Mayor Tim Griffin said at a news conference. "The business of the city will continue and we will recover, but we will never be the same."

Thornton's dispute with City Hall had been escalating since the late 1990s, when he "was promised" a large amount of construction work on a development near his home, said Arthur Thornton, 42, his younger brother. The vast majority of work went to other contractors, he said.

"They just gave him what I'd call the scraps," Arthur Thornton said.

Standing in front of City Hall, where piles of flowers and balloons served as a tribute to the victims, another brother, Gerald Thornton added: "They denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue."

The first shooting victim was Biggs, who was on duty outside City Hall, Thornton then walked into the council chambers carrying one of the slain officer's pistols.

After the Pledge of Allegiance was recited at the start of the meeting, Thornton squeezed off shot after shot. At one point, he yelled "Shoot the mayor!" before he was shot to death by police.

"We crawled under the chairs and just laid there," reporter Janet McNichols, who was covering the meeting for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said in a video interview on the newspaper's Web site. "We heard Cookie shooting, and then we heard some shouting, and the police, the Kirkwood police, had heard what was going on, and they ran in, and they shot him."

Thornton had developed an especially tense relationship with Yost, his brother Arthur said. Yost often would complain that Thornton was parking his commercial vehicles in residential neighborhoods. Some were parked in Thornton's driveway, some in a lot across the street.

Soon police began ticketing the vehicles, and Yost would drive by work sites to remind Thornton he could only store commercial equipment in designated areas, the brother said.

Yost "would ride by and say: 'You need to move this and you need to move that,' and we did it," Arthur Thornton recalled.

Conflict Had Been Growing

Charles Thornton received roughly 150 tickets over the years, and often complained about the treatment at City Council meetings. He called the fines against him a "slave tax," according to accounts of the meetings in The Webster-Kirkwood Times.

After cursing and calling it a "corrupt city council," he was handcuffed and dragged from council chambers, and the council considered banning him permanently. Ultimately, the group decided that while his behavior was disruptive, he had a right to be there.

In a federal lawsuit stemming from his arrests for disorderly conduct during two meetings just weeks apart, Thornton insisted 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 lawsuit Jan. 28, writing that "any restrictions on Thornton's speech were reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and served important governmental interests."

Friends and family said he had grown increasingly frustrated in his fight. But many also said they didn't understand how he could have been capable of such violence, describing him as full of love, churchgoing, and nonviolent.

"He was a pivotal part of the community," said 30-year-old Charles Runnels, who worked for Thornton. "We just were line-dancing the other night."

Longtime friend Franklin McCallie said the rampage was "a brutal and inexcusable act, the act of a person who was not in his right mind when he did it."

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