Plaintiff Who Lost Suits Against St. Louis Suburb Kills Five at Council Meeting
Updated: A man who lost two lawsuits against the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood opened fire at a city council meeting yesterday evening, killing five people.
The suspect, Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, was shot and killed by police, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
The dead included three Kirkwood officials and two police officers. City Attorney John Hessel was also targeted, but he said he fended off the gunman by throwing chairs. The New York Times describes Kirkwood “as a generally placid suburb” in its story on the incident.
Thornton’s most recent lawsuit (PDF) against the city had claimed his free speech rights were violated because he was barred from speaking out at meetings. He had twice been convicted of disorderly conduct for disrupting meetings and was convicted of assaulting the city’s public works director, the Webster-Kirkwood Times reports.
Thornton, the owner of a demolition and construction company, had received several tickets for parking his truck and equipment at job sites, and had also been cited for violating building codes and performing work without permits. Hessel said in 2003 that Thornton had received the most fines he had ever witnessed since he began representing cities in 1977, the Kirkwood-Times says. Hessel was among those who were a target of Thornton’s ire; the litigant had picketed the lawyer’s home, according to the Jan. 28 opinion (PDF) dismissing the most recent lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry wrote that Thornton had appeared at meetings and called the mayor a jackass, complained of a “plantation mentality,” and refused to stop talking when asked. “Because Thornton does not have a First Amendment right to engage in irrelevant debate and to voice repetitive, personal, virulent attacks against Kirkwood and its city officials during the comment portion of a city council public hearing, his claim fails as a matter of law,” she wrote.
In a separate lawsuit, the Missouri Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit (reg. req.) in 2005 that Thornton had filed alleging malicious prosecution and civil rights violations.
The court said Thornton’s appeal did not comply with procedural rules.
“While it makes some citations to the record, the brief statement of facts is incomprehensible, does not accurately represent the record on appeal, and fails to inform the court of the procedural facts or history of this case. In addition, plaintiff fails to provide this court with the standard of review applicable to his claims of error as required under the rules,” the court said.
Thornton’s brother, Gerald, told KMOV the January opinion dismissing the federal lawsuit may have been his brother’s last straw, the Associated Press reports. “He has [spoken] on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue,” he said.
Updated at 6:24 a.m. to include additional information on Thornton’s lawsuits.
