Talk:Kirkwood City Council shooting

message: Is this topic notable, or should it be a Wikinews article?  -- SEWilco (talk) 18:22, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notable or news 

message: Who or what is "Swoboda"?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.69.190.75 (talk) 18:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swoboda  

message: Does anyone have any information on the gunman's rationale for the attack? This seems like it would be a relevant piece of information. I've found numerous articles stating that the gunman had specific greviances with the local government that precipitated the attack, but as of yet I have been unable to identify what the greivances were. 
i.e.:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7293925
'Understand that this was an act of war by my brother. He had an actual person, or people, that he was in battle with. That this was not a random rampage,' Thornton's brother, Gerald Thornton, told MSNBC outside City Hall Friday.
`He felt that as a black contractor he was being singled out,' said Hodges, who is black. `I guess he thought mentally he had no more recourse. That's not an excuse.'
Also, don't know if this is helpful, but found the minutes from the lawsuit: 
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-moedce/case_no-4:2007cv00079/case_id-84601/
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.172.66.85 (talk • contribs) 20:18, 8 February 2008
: See the "Background" section of the article.  It has similar info to that in the local newspaper. -- SEWilco (talk) 22:44, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Background \ Rationale 

message: If you read all the information cited in the article references, including 
the full set of documents from the federal lawsuit, you will get quite a 
different picture from what you have presented or asked about so far, 
about the money anyway.
Kirkwood never got a dime. The city had the right to go after the (under
$20 thousand) fines and court costs via liens or whatever, but never attempted to do so. Instead they chose to attempt resolution via discussion. This has been noted by both McCallie and Hessel, among others.
The $200 thousand you mention, I am stumped where you got that number. 
Could it be that you have read about how he declared just under $500K in debts during his bankruptcy proceedings in 1999, but misremembered it as $200 thousand? 
Here is what the Post-Dispatch summarized the bankruptcy proceedings: $488K in debt, owed to IRS, State of Missouri Department of Revenue, Caterpillar Financial Services, and child support arrears--amongst others. This was in 1999; before the court cases leading to the $18.x thousand in judgments payable to Kirkwood, were even begun, in 2001. Seems likely that some of the tickets
may have been issued before the bankruptcy was filed, but none were ever paid
so it is hard to see how they could have contributed much to the bankruptcy situation.
No, the parking tickets were not for $1,000 each and there was no $20K weekend.  much less a bunch of them. If you look at the citations in the court documents referenced in the article, you see that the portion of the fines that were for parking tickets, were generally around $100 give or take a lesser amount. Perhaps more strikingly, you see how much of the $18.xK was not for parking tickets at all, but for things like assault and battery (twice, $1,000 each), illegal dumping, construction done without having obtained any construction permit for the site, etc.  Maybe the thing that irritated him initially or the most was parking tickets, but he was found guilty of a lot of other stuff that best guess, short of someone spending a week going through the rest of the old records, added up to as much as, or more than, the parking tickets. Were there some citations that probably should not have been issued? Looks like the answer is yes: between the time the first court case began, and the end of the four trials on the citations for which court documents are already referenced in this article, it turned out that he pleaded or was found guilty on only about two thirds of them. Based on the one day I spent watching city court cases in another state thirty years ago, that seems about normal.
 
"Everything he had, nearly thirty years of work after college, taken?" you ask.
Well he finished college in 1979; he declared bankruptcy in 1999.
If his creditors then got anything, it was pennies on the dollar; it was 
the creditors who were 'taken', not him, as far as I can see.  And again,
Kirkwood got nothing from him, then or later, for any of the citations or criminal cases in which he was found guilty between 2002 and 2007.
This is a real tragedy. Six people are dead and another barely clinging to life, because of one very unsound mind.  208.100.194.144 (talk) 12:41, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  reply to questions and remarks from 24.216.67.41 (which was an unsigned edit) 

message: Today I read a large portion of the documents from the federal civil suit filed in 2007 (the only federal suit Thornton filed; see the cited docs.justia.com URL). These include, in some cases, documents from earlier court cases (code citations and criminal charges against Thornton in city and county courts, and civil cases filed by Thornton in state courts at both original and appellate levels.  The city/county/state documents from the earlier cases were presented as evidence by Kirkwood.
Taken as a group, these documents are informative but difficult to resolve in a single set of precise citation or conviction counts. This is because (1) the documents stem from different years, hence the likelihood of different citation totals-to-date; (2) some of the numbers were provided as testimony, others merely offered during arguments about various motions; (3) few of them state the start and end date they are intended to summarize.
There is testimony by Kirkwood officials that at one point he had been found guilty of 100 out of 114 citations, dating from 1996 onward, covered by the 2 city and 2 county trials held in 2001 and 2002. Thornton told the federal judge in 2007 that he had been issued 150 citations. By following the thread of the citation count as best I could (not all of the citations are tracked by the documents available from the cited web site) it appeared possible that  more than 114 citations had in fact been issued at some time or another. Thornton told the federal judge that the citations he disputed began around 2000. Also unclear whether additional citations may have been issued after his 2nd county trial in 2002. So I've used wording to indicate that 'several dozen' citations ended in 'not guilty'. I figured this covered anything from 14 (114 - 100) to 50 (150 - 100).
I have left standing someone else's earlier phrase saying that Thornton was getting citations for parking in places he "...had always..." parked in.  This is probably at least somewhat misleading, on three counts. First, it implies he always parked in the same places; yet remarks from some relatives and neighbors quoted in some of the cited articles, and from city officials, indicate that at least at times, he parked at different places at or near job sites, depending on the job site. Second, it does not clarify whether he had 'always' parked in those places only when the area was unincorporated, versus, had also 'always' parked there even after incorporation in 1992, and up until he began getting (many?) parking citations in 2000. Third, a Kirkwood official stated in one court document that Thornton did not begin getting (many?) citations for illegal parking until around 2000 because before then, he typically parked the equipment in a rented lot in a commercially zoned area, but stopped renting that lot around 2000 (which would have been soon after he filed for bankruptcy in 1999).  At the moment I can't find the specific place in the pile of federal documents, where this is mentioned...and I don't know how to reference a specific document inside a docs.justia.com case file anyway...so I am leaving this phrase as it stands, despite the fact that it should probably be changed, or expanded to mention other aspects of the parking/citation history. Publius3 (talk) 09:19, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your thoroughness, Publius!  You've really gone beyond the call of duty on this one... --71.10.176.130 (talk) 23:33, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  some issues difficult to research 

message: It is definitely noteworthy, and documented in many media outlets (but mainly the StL Post Dispatch), that members of the community praised Thornton.  There were many signs around the Meecham Park neighborhood that memorialized Thornton but said nothing of his victims.  A few people even went so far as to call him a "Hero" at subsequent community meetings regarding the event.  This surely should be covered here.  When I'm not at work I will find links to the stories that highlight this view.  Whether or not you think he is a monster or a hero, the fact that there is such division over the simple view of this man should be reflected here.  --Mijunkin (talk) 19:03, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Kudos to whoever added the bit about the Meacham Park association reaction; it's good to see that part of the article fleshed out more.  I think it's equally important, however, to add some material about the number of people who disagree with that interpretation of the Kirkwood/Meacham Park relationship; I've certainly seen a lot of people in the recent news disagreeing sharply with that interpretation, such as the interview the Webster-Kirkwood Times did with ex-mayor Herb Jones, or the statements to the press by the surviving council members and John Hessel, the city attorney.  I'm not saying that the block quote from the anonymous minister should be cut out--just that we should make sure that it doesn't stand alone as if it speaks for all of Kirkwood...  --24.207.252.216 (talk) 01:39, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

text: Etcc68, please cite what facts you'd like to include in the article that better portray Cookie Thornton's side. It appears to be beyond dispute that he refused an offer to have 100% of his city fines forgiven if he would leave the city council in peace, and that he chose instead to premeditatedly murder a number of people; if these facts make him look like a monster, that's the fault of the facts, not the article. If he "left people unharmed," it's simply because the police killed him sixty to ninety seconds after the he started shooting in the city council chamber; he was killing as quickly as he could up until then, including Connie Karr, the councilwoman who had often taken his side against the rest of the council. If you think what he did was wrong, perhaps you should stop trying so hard to defend it. But if you do want to defend, please offer facts, and not just a comment about how you don't like how the facts make Thornton look.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.92.21.9 (talk) 14:29, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: One-Sided "Reaction" Section

message: A user has revised one sentence so that instead of saying Biggs was shot (in a parking lot) across the street from City Hall, it says that Biggs was shot in the parking lot behind city hall.  Yet at http://www.stltoday.com/mds/news/html/1143 the shooting was depicted as having occurred in the parking lot
across the street and near the rear entrance to Imo's, where Biggs was going to pick up dinner. This depiction is in agreement with the published work of various reporters in the first 48 hours after the shooting. This is why the Wikipedia article had, until today, said "across the street".   Therefore, I have revised the wording to again say "across the street".
Some of the local media, in reporting on the 100-plus page report on the shootings issued by prosecuting attorney McCulloch at a press conference on August 8, also mention that Biggs was shot across the street. For example, http://www.kmov.com/topstories/stories/kmov_localnews_080808_kirkwood_shootings_report.295d8a81.html .
Among retellings of the press conference remarks and/or printed report, one account from an out of town newspaper says "behind city hall". Another account says the parking lot was "adjacent" to city hall. Another  says "outside". I think some editors or reporters who were not already thoroughly familiar with the story, and also not entirely familiar with the relative locations of the buildings and lots in the vicinity, reworked other people's words and introduced a factual error ("behind city hall") in the process of that rework of accounts of the prosecutor's press conference. Publius3 (talk) 03:45, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Location of Biggs' death 

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message: I think it could be useful to folks interested in this topic:
http://elegytoconnie.weebly.com/screenings.html
Looking for comment before I add it.
Aaron.michels (talk) 02:21, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: External Link to 2014 Documentary?

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thread_title:  External links modified