“Justice was not served.”
Thus reads one of the handmade signs standing in the impromptu memorial that started taking shape in front of Kirkwood City Hall after Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, age 52, shot dead five people and wounded two others there last Thursday before being fatally shot himself.
Clearly, justice was not served to the individuals killed and wounded by Thornton. They showed up for a routine City Council meeting and suddenly found themselves in a bloodbath.
Clearly, justice was not served to Kirkwood police officers Tom Ballman and William Biggs, Kirkwood City Council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr, or Kirkwood Director of Public Works Kenneth Yost, who lost their lives at Thornton’s hands.
Nor was justice served to Mayor Mike Swoboda or Suburban Journals reporter Todd Smith, who were wounded by Thornton. Swoboda’s injuries were critical; at press time he remained in critical condition, with two head wounds.
Ironically, for a meeting that resulted in multiple medical emergencies, the hottest item on Thursday’s agenda, according to Smith (who was shot in the hand and expects to recover completely), was a measure concerning the construction of a medical center.
“Justice was not served.”
This blunt statement begs the question: Was Cookie Thornton also denied justice?
Not by the police officer who reportedly shot him dead to prevent him from shooting anyone else last Thursday, but by the city officials with whom he had struggled for years?
And, given that Thornton is black and all of his victims are white, was racial justice – or injustice – a factor in these killings?
In a statement delivered personally to the media Saturday morning, Thornton’s widow, Maureen Thornton, did not reference race. After apologizing to the families of the victims, however, she did allude to her late husband’s long-standing fight with City Hall.
“I stand in the aftermath of events that have been going on for more than eight years with the City of Kirkwood,” said Maureen Thornton, who currently lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., where she is a middle school principal. She said her husband had been commuting between St. Petersburg and Kirkwood since she accepted the position in 2004.
Like Cookie’s mother, Annie Bell Thornton, his widow used the metaphor of a storm to describe his murderous outburst.
“In the middle of a terrible weather change, a tornado or a hurricane, there has to be a force that causes the funnel to move,” Maureen Thornton said.
“When you are dealing with forces of good and evil, something causes the funnel to move.”
What caused the funnel to move?
A violation on a building site
“It all started with a violation on a building site,” said former City Council member Paul W. Ward.
Ward said Thornton’s troubles began after he did demolition work as an independent contractor and then left his equipment on the jobsite. To stay up to code, according to Ward, Thornton said the equipment remained on the site because it still needed to be graded, which wasn’t the case.
“He tried to bend the rules,” Ward, who is himself a contractor, told the American.
“I tried to warn him, but after you have been warned a few times, you are going to feel the full weight of the law.”
Ward served on the Kirkwood City Council from 2000-2004. He said Thornton’s troubles with code violations and the resulting tickets spiraled throughout those years and beyond.
Of the many citations, Ward recalled another code violation regarding illegally parked heavy equipment. The address on the citation was incorrect, but the local court ruled a violation had occurred and Thornton still had to pay, according to Ward.
“I told him, ‘Cookie, it looks like they got you,’” Ward recalled. “But he believed he was right. From that day forward, he dug in his heels.”
When Thornton finally snapped last Thursday, his fines had accumulated at least as high as $20,000, according to his widow. Other reports place the total as high as $64,000.
Ward is one of only two African Americans ever to have served on Kirkwood’s City Council. In fact, his father, the Rev. Wallace W. Ward, was the first black to run for public office in Kirkwood. Thornton himself ran unsuccessfully for City Council in 1994. The Kirkwood City Council had only white members the night Thornton opened fire.
But Thornton was not a disgruntled outsider by anyone’s description. He had been a massively popular, racially integrated, three-sport athlete in high school and a star athlete in college. He had done much business with the City of Kirkwood and area employers. Thornton was friends or had been friends with most of the people he shot last Thursday.
“Everyone knew him,” said Ward, who wept deeply during the course of a long conversation with the American.
“Cookie wasn’t a stranger. He was well known and liked.”
His closest friendships certainly crossed over into the white community. Jennifer Kier-Palmer was one of many white classmates of Thornton’s who remained his lifelong friend. She said just last year he repaired her crumbling driveway for free one day when she was away from the house.
“Who else would do that but Cookie?” she remembered, though tears.
But she said Thornton did rant about the mayor and City Council at every opportunity, and this only got worse over the years.
As his fines mounted, Thornton’s fight with City Hall grew more and more public. He was twice arrested and convicted for disorderly conduct at City Council meetings. Thornton’s struggles with City Hall became a common subject in the local paper and around town.
“People still thought well about Cookie,” Ward said. “He was just obsessed with this one thing.”
A great divide?
“This is something that took place over time, and perhaps it could have been avoided,” said Harry Jones, an elder of Men and Women of Faith Ministries.
Jones and others spoke Friday at an emergency meeting of the Meacham Park Neighborhood Association. Many residents sorted out their conflicting feelings about Thornton, his crimes and the relationship of mostly black Meacham Park (where Thornton lived) to Kirkwood, which incorporated the neighborhood in 1991.
As of the 2000 census, Kirkwood had 27,324 residents – 90.76 percent of those white and 7.07 percent black, with no other ethnic group accounting for more than 1 percent of its suburban population.
Many in the crowd audibly agreed with Jones when he said, “There always has been a great divide between Kirkwood and Meacham Park.”
It remains open to question, however, whether this “great divide” between black Meacham Park and white Kirkwood played an important role in Thornton’s struggles with City Hall.
Ward said Thornton’s problems do have roots in the annexation of Meacham Park by Kirkwood. The Thornton family owned land in Meacham Park, which had lax codes for storing heavy equipment on private property. But Ward said this issue was known and addressed at the time of annexation.
“Over time, we warned him about these non-conforming uses of his property,” Ward said. Ward even helped Thornton to locate a rental property in Kirkwood where he could legally store his equipment. But when Thornton could not keep up with rent, his old problems returned.
Ward said, as a black man, he knows racism when he sees it. He said he has encountered racism from Kirkwood police before. But, in Thornton’s case, he said, “I saw no racism.”
At one of his City Council protests, Thornton accused the council of having a “plantation-like mentality.” But Kier-Palmer said his many white friends did not take that as a personal indictment.
“It really wasn’t that Cookie went crazy against the City or the whites or anything, just the ones he was fighting with,” Kier-Palmer said.
Knowing Thornton intimately for most of his life, she said, she is convinced that he developed a “mental illness that went undiagnosed and lost his coping skills as to how to deal with his problems with the City of Kirkwood.”
She is not qualified to make that medical judgment, and according to his widow, Thornton “never, ever, ever, ever” received a diagnosis of mental illness or treatment for it.
Maureen Thornton said, “I do agree that for a man to do what Cookie did, he had to snap.”
Ward said many people worked to keep Thornton from snapping.
“I talked to him, my brother talked to him, my mother talked to him,” Ward said.
“I never reached his heart. It bothers me to this day. He had hardened himself so nobody could get in.”
The City eventually offered to wave all of Thornton’s fines, Ward said, “if he would just get on with his life and obey the law.” But Ward said Thornton believed that would not have served him justice.
Franklin McCallie, former principal at Kirkwood High School, said Thornton had described his rejection of that offer as “a matter of principle” and that he planned to “sue for millions.”
However, Thornton recently had lost a federal lawsuit, which may help to explain why, to use his widow’s metaphor, the tornado touched down last Thursday.
On Jan. 28, U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry ruled that Thornton’s First Amendment rights had not been violated in May 2006 when he was removed from a City Council meeting due to disorderly conduct.
At that meeting, Thornton displayed a picture of a donkey and made insulting comments about Mayor Swoboda and the City Council, after the meeting had been opened for public comments regarding the proposed expansion of two businesses.
“As the meeting was a limited designated public forum, Kirkwood had the right to restrict the topic of discussion to the expansion of two businesses,” Perry ruled.
“Any restrictions on Thornton’s speech were reasonable, viewpoint-neutral, and served important governmental interests,” Perry ruled.
Justice, according to a federal judge, had been served to Cookie Thornton. As a number of grieving families – and, in fact, an entire grieving suburb – can attest, Cookie Thornton did not agree with this judgment. And he decided to take justice, or vengeance, into his own hands.
His brother, Gerald Thornton, told KMOV, “He had spoke on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied him all access to the rights of protection, and therefore he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue.”
