Posted on 02/07/2008 7:41:01 PM PST by StarCMC
Six people, including two Kirkwood Police Officers were shot and killed Thursday night when a lone gunman walked into a city council planning meeting and started shooting. The six dead include the gunman.
The Mayor of Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda, two city councilmen, and the Public works director were reported wounded. All had been taken to a local hospital.
Police were able to return fire. The gunman, identified as Charles Lee Thornton, was also killed.
Sources said Thornton was well known to police and city officials. He had disrupted city meetings several times in the past, and had been escorted out of council meetings.
A Post-Dispatch reporter who was attending the session said the 7 p.m. meeting had just started when the shooter, who she identified as Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, rushed into the council chambers yelling and began opening fire with at least one weapon. He started yelling "shoot the mayor" while walking around and firing, hitting a police officer first, the reporter said.
The reporter also said the shooter fired at the city attorney, who tried to fight off the attacker by throwing chairs. The shooter then moved behind desk where the council sits and fired more shots at council members.
About 30 people were in the council chambers at the time of the shooting, the reporter said.
Dozens of emergency vehicles were on the scene and an area of several blocks was cordoned off along a busy north-south corridor around the city hall.
Missouri ping.
There’s some crazy people in this world.
What is the status of CCW in Mo ?
WAY to close to home...I’ve seen the shooter at council meetings before...copters overhead
What was his beef or was he just insane?
LLS
Lotta nuts in the news today.
Glad you werent there.
Jeez! The Mayor’s son is one of our pilots!!
They had recently denied his bar and restaurant a liquor license. He wanted retaliation. He nuts because he did it, but you can connect the dots as to motive.
I was readign the other thread — this is just so horrible. And no, there is never going to be any kind of justification for such actions.........at least not as far as I am concerned.
Kirkwood is where Devlin, Hornbeck, and Ownby were found recently as well. CCW is legal in MO except in government buildings like where the shooting took place tonight.
There’s been conflicting reports — some have heard the mayor was shot in the hand; Mike Owens at KSDK said “head.”
Yep.
Completely agree.
“What was his beef or was he just insane?”
I know many folks driven crazy with all the bureacracy they have to go through in our town. And I’m sure more than one has had crazy visions. Its a thin line - and luckily strong enough in most of us to just keep it in our fantasy world of wringing a city councilman’s neck!
So there was plenty of advance warning that this guy was a psycho.
I will guess that this dirtbag was no stranger to both the criminal justice system and the mental health system - yet he was in possession of a firearm.
There are others who are culpable in this matter as well.
It's not an argument against RKBA -- far from it, given how it all ended.
But the carnage in this case should be a rather stark lesson to those who always seem to come out of the woodwork claiming that "if so-and-so had been armed, none of this would have happened."
RKBA is a damned fine thing, but it is not a sure guarantee of stopping a determined gunman before he kills. We should be very careful not to oversell our position.
ping
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