US: Gunman's year of rage ends in massacre

The man who shot dead five people at a Missouri council meeting was angry over thousands of dollars in parking tickets and citations piled up against his asphalt firm.

Charles “Cookie” Thornton raged at Kirkwood city council meetings over the years, saying he was being persecuted, mocking city officials as “jackasses” and accusing them of having a racist “plantation mentality” because he was black.

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

On Thursday night, he left his home and headed to one more city council meeting, carrying a loaded gun. On his bed back home, his younger brother said he found a note that read: “The truth will come out in the end.”

Before he was shot dead by police, Thornton, 52, killed two policemen, Tom Ballman and William Biggs; council members Michael Lynch and Connie Karr; and director of public works Kenneth Yost.

Mayor Mike Swoboda was taken to hospital in a critical condition with gunshot wounds, and a newspaper reporter covering the meeting, Todd Smith of Suburban Journals, was in a satisfactory condition.

Residents of Kirkwood, about 20 miles south west of central St Louis, gathered at a midday prayer vigil yesterday at the United Methodist Church, where a bell tolled six times – once for each of the dead – as mourners held white candles.

“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 his brother, Arthur, 42. The vast majority of work went to other contractors, he said.

“They just gave him what I’d call the scraps,” Mr Thornton said.

In the hours before the shooting spree, Thornton was helping to organise a fish fry to help pay for a friend’s funeral, said his mother, 83-year-old Annie Thornton.

Before he left for the council meeting, he hugged her and stopped to speak.

“To God be the glory. I love you all. I’ll see you later,” she recalled him saying.

Thornton’s first shooting victim was policeman Mr Biggs, who was on duty outside city hall. He then walked into the council chambers carrying one of the dead officer’s pistols to continue the rampage.

Thornton squeezed off shot after shot, at one point, yelling: “Shoot the mayor!” before he was shot 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 website.

“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.”

The shooting brought a violent end to a feud that had gone back years.

Thornton received about 150 parking tickets over the years and would often complain about the treatment at city council meetings. He called the fines against him a “slave tax”, according to accounts of the meetings in the town’s paper, The Webster-Kirkwood Times.

At one meeting, he was cuffed and dragged from council chambers, and the council considered banning him permanently, but decided that while his behaviour 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 that Kirkwood officials violated his constitutional rights to free speech.

But a judge in St Louis threw out the case on January 28, ruling 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 did not understand how he could have been capable of such violence.

Long-time friend Franklin McCallie said Thornton once told him that the city would drop the fines if he “would just follow the law”.

“In our long talks, I begged him to do this,” Mr McCallie said. “But Cookie said it was a matter of principle with him and that he wanted to sue the city for millions of dollars.”