“We didn’t want that event to define who we are,” the Rev. David Bennett said of the tragic events of February 7, 2008, when Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton opened fire in a Kirkwood City Council meeting, killing five and wounding two others before he was shot and killed by police.
Bennett is pastor of Kirkwood Methodist Church, where services for Thornton were held in 2008. He also leads the community team that negotiated a mediation agreement with the City of Kirkwood to address issues that were aired in the aftermath of the shootings.
The agreement was discussed last week at a Town Hall Meeting held at Kirkwood’s City Hall in the Council Chambers and led by Mayor Arthur J. McDonnell.
“Get the segregation out of your minds – kill segregation,” Charles Howard, another member of the Community Mediation Team, said at the Town Hall meeting.
Though some residents said they wanted to believe this mediation process would help the community, others said the mediation process didn’t do enough to address long-standing grievances. With a lot of questions remaining in the minds of residents, tension filled the air at the meeting.
Harriett Patton, president of the Meacham Park Neighborhood Improvement Association, said there was “little or no possibility of forging a consensus” on the most serious issues facing Kirkwood.
She said this in her September 14, 2009 resignation letter when she left the Community Mediation Team two-thirds into the process.
“I tried to fully participate and hung in there as long as I could,” Patton told The American, “but time after time, my suggestions were totally rejected. You can’t keep telling me the sky is black and I’m looking at a blue sky.”
Patton is a lifelong resident of Meacham Park, the majority-black neighborhood of Kirkwood that previously was an independent community. Many of Cookie Thornton’s legal problems with the City of Kirkwood originally stemmed from zoning issues with his property and vehicles in Meacham Park.
“The people at Meacham Park feel they’ve been manipulated, used and abused,” said William F. Hall, an adjunct university professor and former City of Kirkwood employee.
Other then lingering dissatisfaction with the mediation process and agreement, many concerns addressed at the meeting concern the Kirkwood Police Department, which lost an officer to Thornton’s rampage.
“You gotta sit down and trust each other,” Police Chief Jack Plummer said at the Town Hall meeting.
Plummer said the department is working to improve communications with citizens in an effort to eliminate negative perceptions and encourage greater trust, respect, cooperation, partnership and collaboration between police and the community.
He said the department will increase efforts to recruit minorities for the Police Explorer Program, a program that will receive greater emphasis beginning this year.
He said the police department also will continue its efforts to be non-discriminatory by increasing the weight of a category on department evaluations regarding discriminatory behavior.
He pledged better police presence in Kirkwood’s Meacham Park. New pamphlets are being prepared to instruct citizens on how to file a complaint against the police and will be available after April 1.
Also, Plummer said the department would work more closely with school officials to help those youths who are in trouble with the police. Already, he said, a program assigning officers to area schools is fostering positive contact between students and police and has reduced youth crime.
Plummer said the department would with volunteers to develop jobs for minority youth and other youth expelled from school. In partnership with the Kirkwood School District, these students will be given community service projects to help prevent them from being unproductive during their period of expulsion.
Ramona Miller, an assistant principal at Kirkwood Senior High School who attended the meeting, said officials need partnership to help improve the lives of youth. “The community isn’t stepping up either,” Miller said.
The mediation agreement states that the City also will strengthen its Human Rights Advisory and Awareness Commission formed to focus on racial issues and concerns.
Kirkwood City Council Member Iggy Yuan participated in the mediation process. At the meeting he addressed concerns with the Meacham Park Tax Increment Financing Program, which has since been discontinued but left lingering bad feelings in the community.
Yuan said the funds were used for improvements to homes, parks and streets. Yuan said the TIF funds have been exhausted and the program can no longer serve as an avenue for neighborhood improvement.
William Whitcomb of the U.S. Department of Justice, Community Relations Service moderated the mediation process with the help of C.J. Larkin, administrative director of the Dispute Resolution Program at the Washington University School of Law, and law students Larkin recruited.
The City of Kirkwood has copies of the 13-page Mediation Agreement available for free. The supporting exhibits, contained in a 122-page bound document, are available at a cost of $10. Both documents are available for free from the City’s website at www.kirkwoodmo.org. Both documents are also available on reserve at the Kirkwood Public Library, 200 S. Kirkwood Road.
Anyone wishing to obtain a free copy of the Mediation Agreement or to purchase a copy of the supporting exhibits can do so at Kirkwood City Hall, Office of the City Clerk, 139 S. Kirkwood Road, Kirkwood, Missouri, 63122, during normal business hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.