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The Kirkwood shootings

By Phil Barron ⋅ February 8, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Offline and away from the news last night, I was completely unaware of the shooting rampage that took place just nine miles away at Kirkwood City Hall last night. Seven people shot by one agitated gunman, five of them killed - two police officers, three city officials. The mayor and a Suburban Journals reporter were wounded; the mayor is now in intensive care. The shooter, a local businessman named Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, was killed by police.

Thornton apparently had a long and antagonistic relationship with Kirkwood that reads like an episode of Dateline or 48 Hours. The thing that strikes you upon reading and listening to news accounts is the public nature of Thornton’s downward spiral into hostility; people in local government were afraid of him and others aren’t terribly surprised.

Tensions had escalated recently between Charles Thornton and the council, said Doug Vaughn, a sports anchor with KMOV who was a friend of Thornton’s.

Vaughn knows several city officials and he said they expressed concern about their safety. “I know a lot of them were worried something violent was going to happen sometime,” said Vaughn, who graduated with Charles Thornton from Kirkwood High School in 1974. “If someone had said there had been a shooting at Kirkwood City Hall, I would have said Cookie Thornton, based on what’s been going on the last 10 years.”

It’s baffling that a popular star athlete in high school could turn into a man known throughout Kirkwood as the City Hall nuisance, Vaughn said. “He was a track star, the Missouri state triple jump champion. He was the life of the party, always a big smile on his face. Everyone wanted to be around him.”

But after Charles Thornton began getting tickets outside his home for parking vehicles he used in his asphalt business, his demeanor began to change, Vaughn said. “He created a real scene,” he said.

As with politics, all tragedies are local.

Elsewhere, the St. Louis-based political blog PubDef published a statement by the Organization for Black Struggle which casts Thornton’s killing of five people and wounding of two others as the consequence of racial tensions in the city of Kirkwood.

Sidebar: A friend of mine was in a church in Kirkwood last night, perhaps a half-mile from City Hall. He said that sirens could be heard, though no one knew their cause. At length, someone told the attendees that the authorities had requested that no one leave the building until notified. Upon leaving, my friend noted that the police had blocked off the area around the municipal building on Kirkwood Road for about two blocks in each direction. Upon turning on his car radio, he learned of the shootings.

Addendum: I said something in comments that I’d like to append here. I think that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has done a tremendous job in recounting the various aspects of the Kirkwood shooting, including many details that (as commenter Bitty noted) have not made their way to national media. It should be further noted that 1) a member of the extended P-D family, a reporter for the Suburban Journals, was present at the shooting and has provided much information despite understandable distress, and 2) the P-D lost another member of its family just days ago with the murder of former editor Nancy Miller.

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