Category: Missouri

The headline probably seems like common sense to anyone who knows anything about St. Louis. If you’re from Missouri or the part of western Illinois near St. Louis, you probably don’t need any warnings, because the city is notorious dangerous, and folks in the immediate vicinity know to avoid it. “Well, Stacy, how dangerous is St. Louis?” you ask.

IT’S WORSE THAN BALTIMORE!

This is a Third World category of danger found in very few places in the United States. In 2023, only two cities — New Orleans, with a homicide rate of 46 per 100,000 residents, and Memphis, at 41 per 100,000 residents — exceeded the rate in St. Louis which, at 38 homicides per 100,000 residents, was worse than either Baltimore or Washington, D.C., which tied for fourth place that year. My friend Dana Pico likes to joke about “Killadelphia,” but the homicide rate there was just 26 per 100,000. And there were twice as many homicides per capita in St. Louis than in either Cleveland or Detroit. That’s pretty doggone bad.

Did I mention that the population of St. Louis has seen a drastic decline in recent decades? There are currently fewer than 300,000 residents in the city, down more than 50% since 1970, but not all of the lost population was murdered. Most of them escaped to the suburbs, or left the area entirely, as rampant crime turned St. Louis into a nightmare of violence and thievery. Did I mention that St. Louis is a stronghold of the Democratic Party? The city is part of Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which is rated D+29 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index and was formerly represented by “Squad” member Cori Bush, before she lost the 2024 Democratic primary to Wesley Bell. (Who to blame? The Jews!)

In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris got 81% of the vote in St. Louis. Nothing good ever happens in a place where 80% of people vote Democrat, which is why it would be a mistake to think that you could grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks in St. Louis and survive the experience:

ST. LOUIS — A woman was fatally shot Tuesday morning in the drive-through area of a Starbucks coffee shop in the city’s Tower Grove East neighborhood, police said.
The incident took place about 10 a.m. in the 2300 block of South Grand Boulevard near Sidney Street.
Police were searching the area for a man wearing a lime green vest and hard hat who was walking away from the scene.

If you’ll look at the map at the top of the post, you can see that this Starbucks is near Tower Grove Park, actually one of the “good” neighborhoods in St. Louis, but given the wretchedness of the city, even the “good” neighborhoods are awful. The victim of Tuesday’s shooting was soon identified as 28-year-old ice skating coach Sam Linehan.

It did not take long for police in St. Louis to apprehend the suspect who, to no one’s surprise, had “a lengthy criminal record”:

A former Team USA skater was reportedly shot and killed in a Starbucks drive-thru in Missouri during an alleged armed robbery involving a suspect with a lengthy criminal record.
Citing court documents, the New York Post said Gabrielle “Sam” Linehan, 28, was sitting in her car outside the coffee shop when she was murdered on Tuesday shortly after 10 a.m.
The media outlet identified the suspect as 58-year-old Keith Lamon Brown.
Online jail records show Brown was arrested early Wednesday morning. He was charged with first-degree murder, three counts of first-degree robbery, four counts of armed criminal action, as well as one count of unlawful possession of a gun connected to Linehan’s death and other recent robberies, according to the records.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department shared surveillance photos of the suspect, which showed him wearing a high-visibility vest and white helmet during the time of the deadly shooting.
Police said a SWAT team later executed a search warrant at his home, where detectives found evidence from two prior robberies.
Court documents allege that Brown was wanted for two armed robberies that happened just a few days before Linehan’s murder.
“On or about February 6, 2026, the defendant pointed a firearm into the Confidential Victim 1’s vehicle while she was in the drive-thru. He stole a 9mm handgun, her purse containing bank cards, and Confidential Victim 1’s and her daughter’s cell phones,” the documents noted.
“On or about February 8, 2026, the defendant went into a store and pointed his firearm at Confidential Victim 2, who was working as a cashier, demanding and receiving money. At both locations, he discharged his firearms,” according to the documents.
The documents also described Brown as a convicted felon, noting that he has a criminal history that dates back to 1986.
“On or about November 14, 1986, in County of Saint Louis, the defendant was convicted of the offense of armed criminal action,” the documents show.
About a decade later on October 31, 1996, he was convicted of the offense of armed criminal action, per the records.

This guy is a one-man crime wave, and appears to have been perpetrating felonies more or less continuously since he was a teenager. Which is to say, he is a typical resident of St. Louis, a city where Kamala Harris got 81% of the vote. Nothing good ever happens there, and the only advice I can offer is to avoid St. Louis entirely. Don’t become a statistic.

 

When this story started breaking Wednesday afternoon, there was a lot of confusion and CNN (I watch, so you don’t have to) had on some “experts” who were talking about terrorism, blah blah blah, which I didn’t believe for one second. Pardon me if I’ve been paying enough attention to news about mass shootings to have some pre-conceived beliefs about the likely scenario when gunfire erupts someplace like downtown Kansas City.

Far be it from me to engage in wild speculation, or to rush out a story based on a bystander’s video I’d seen online, but my hunch was this was some kind of beef between teenage gangbangers, likely committed with stolen pistols featuring extended magazines and a “Glock switch” for automatic fire: “Pray and spray” mode, which explains the high ratio of wounded victims to fatalities. Your teenage gangbanger doesn’t spend any time at the target range, OK? He doesn’t aim his weapon, he just points it in the general direction of whoever he’s beefing with. And these “usual suspects” have no regard for bystanders:

The Kansas City Police revealed new updates on the shooting that left one dead and several injured during the Super Bowl victory parade.
Police Chief Stacey Graves said three suspects, including two juveniles, have been taken into custody relating to the shooting, and 22 people have been injured, according to The Associated Press (AP). A mother of two children, 44-year-old Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was reportedly killed in the shooting.
The victims injured in the attack ranged between the ages of 8 and 47 years old, and half are younger than 16, The AP reported. The University Health Truman Medical Center and Children’s Mercy Hospital confirmed they received victims from the shooting as emergency patients.
Graves said the shooting began as a “dispute between several people that ended in gunfire,” and confirmed the shooting was not linked to terrorism and the suspects have not yet been charged, according to CNN. . . .
“We are working to determine the involvement of others. And it should be noted we have recovered several firearms. This incident is still a very active investigation,” Graves said at a news conference, according to the outlet.

By now, liberals are already talking about new laws to reduce “gun violence,” as they call it, without acknowledging the likelihood that none of the perpetrators of this shooting were legally carrying. If they weren’t minors, they were convicted felons and, as I say, it’s a good bet that all of the firearms used were stolen. This is connected to the “criminal justice reform” attitude that mere property crimes shouldn’t be punished. Liberal prosecutors have started taking a turn-’em-loose attitude toward thieves and burglars, based on the misguided belief that sending people to prison for such property crimes is an example of “systemic racism” or whatever. But guess what thieves and burglars like to steal? Guns!

So next thing you know, every 15-year-old wannabe thug in the ’hood is packing a 9mm with a 33-round magazine and a “Glock switch,” and then you have atrocities like this one in Kansas City, which causes the liberals to demand new gun laws when they don’t want to enforce the gun laws we already have because that would mean “mass incarceration.”

If (and it’s a pretty big “if”) police are able to identify the shooters, don’t expect to see mug shots of the suspects on TV. That wouldn’t do much to advance the liberal narrative about “gun violence.” We’re supposed to think maybe it was NRA lifetime members wearing red MAGA caps who did the shooting, and don’t CNN to report anything to the contrary.

UPDATE: More details from a shooting victim:

A man who was struck by a bullet during the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade on Wednesday has spoken out about the ordeal, explaining what he and his family saw prior to the gunman opening fire.
Jacob Gooch Sr. of nearby Leavenworth, Kansas corroborated testimony from others that the horrific act was sparked by a dispute . . .
In an interview with CBS Mornings, Gooch explained that while he did not see the shooter himself, he did hear a woman say “Don’t do it, not here, this is stupid” before gunshots rang out.
Gooch, who was shot in the ankle and has been in and out of hospital dealing with broken bones in his foot, said he and his family initially thought someone had set off fireworks, but soon realized that wasn’t the case.
He went on to note that his wife and daughter “saw the gun come out and start shooting.”
“Some lady was holding [the suspect] back and people had started backing up,” he added, “and then he pulled it out and just started shooting and spinning in a circle.”

Like I said, “Pray and spray.”

Witness to Kansas City shooting says he heard girl say ‘don’t do it here, not here, this is stupid’ before gunfire beganhttps://t.co/I6RBuvArCuhttps://t.co/I6RBuvArCu

— Jack Poso ?? (@JackPosobiec) February 15, 2024

 

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Just Monday, I wrote about this situation (“Another Soros-Funded Disaster”), and now it has quickly moved to a resolution:

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner announced Thursday that, after weeks of blistering pressure from Missouri lawmakers, she would indeed resign, effective June 1.
In a letter addressed to Gov. Mike Parson, Gardner makes no mention of the turmoil in her office nor the extensive staff departures in recent weeks. Instead, she says she is stepping down to prevent the state legislature from passing a bill that would strip her of most of her power and “permanently remove the right of every St. Louis voter to elect their Circuit Attorney.”
“The most powerful weapon I have to fight back against these outsiders stealing your voices and your rights is to step back,” she writes. “I took this job to serve the people of the City of St. Louis, and that’s still my North star.”
News of her departure sent shockwaves through the halls of the two courthouses in downtown St. Louis where victims, defense attorneys, judges and even Gardner’s own staffers had complained for months about critical office departures and widespread dysfunction. It also reverberated through the Capitol in Jefferson City where lawmakers had been debating a bill to strip her of power.
At the same time, the news left questions about who would handle upcoming hearings, communicate with victims and pick up the pieces of an office that now has roughly a third of the attorneys as when Gardner took office.
Gardner declined to speak to a Post-Dispatch reporter about her decision as she left an all-staff meeting at the Carnahan Courthouse on Thursday afternoon.
Gov. Mike Parson will appoint Gardner’s replacement. His spokeswoman said Thursday morning that he would “begin the process to fill this office vacancy.”
Gardner, 47, St. Louis’ first Black circuit attorney, swept into office in 2017 in a national wave of victories for progressive prosecutors, who pledged to be a unifying force and build public trust in the criminal justice system.
Gardner quickly came under scrutiny within months of taking office for mass staff departures. She then about a year into office indicted sitting Gov. Eric Greitens for taking a partially nude photo of a woman in a Central West End basement without her consent. But charges were eventually dropped, an investigator she hired pleaded guilty in federal court to concealing documents in the case and Gardner herself was reprimanded by the Missouri Supreme Court and forced to pay a $750 fee in an ethics case over her office’s mishandling of evidence.
She continued to face public scrutiny over her “exclusion list” of St. Louis police officers, whose work she didn’t trust, and for her decision to charge a Central West End couple with brandishing guns at racial justice protesters.
Still, Gardner was re-elected for a second term in late 2020 in a landslide. She pledged to continue fighting for equality and criminal justice reforms in St. Louis.
But her second term brought more staff departures, leaving her with half the number of attorneys as when she took office. The state legislature filed bills that would strip her of most of her power.
Then in February, the scandals intensified when a car speeding through downtown streets crashed, pinning between two vehicles a teen visiting St. Louis for a volleyball tournament, and leading to the amputation of both of her legs. The car’s driver, Daniel Riley, had remained free after court delays, despite violating his bond dozens of times.
Gardner’s office was widely blamed for delaying Riley’s trial and not filing to revoke bond. She, in turn, blamed a judge for not accepting a bond reduction request and released a statement: “This is not the time for finger-pointing,” she said then.
The reaction was swift. Scores of people, including former allies, began calling for Gardner’s resignation. Bailey filed a lawsuit seeking her removal.

Good-bye, and good-riddance.

 

When we talk about crime-riddled cities, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia get a lot more attention than St. Louis, but on a per-capita basis, crime is much worse in St. Louis, which regularly leads New Orleans and Baltimore as the most violent major city in America. Alas, so many people have fled St. Louis in recent decades that it almost doesn’t qualify as a “major” city now, with fewer than 300,000 residents. (Henderson, Nevada, Greensboro, North Carolina, and Irvine, California, are all bigger than St. Louis now.) Things have been going downhill in St. Louis for a long time, so it would be wrong to say that the 2016 election of Kim Gardner as Circuit Attorney for the city has caused the decline; rather, the scandal-ridden tenure of Gardner is symptomatic of the social decay in a city that has long since passed the point of no return. Only in a desolate urban nightmare could someone with such little aptitude for office have gotten elected, and it is impossible to pity the residents of St. Louis, as they have gotten exactly what they deserve for electing a prosecutor who ran on an anti-law-enforcement platform.

Kim Gardner has never bothered to hide her hatred of police. In many cases, she has refused to prosecute criminals, and she has driven out nearly all the experienced prosecutors in her office:

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Office has dismissed more than 9,000 cases, frequently as they were about to go to trial according to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s latest filing.
Judges have been “forced” to dismiss more than 2,700 cases because of the prosecution’s failure to provide defendants with discovery and speedy trials, according to the filing.
The few assistant attorneys who remain must endure a “toxic environment” that has driven dedicated attorneys — burdened with unbearable caseloads — to exhaustion and medical emergencies, Bailey said in the filing.
All are among new allegations Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed [March 21] against Gardner in a 121-page amended petition as part of a rare legal maneuver to remove her from office.
Bailey began the quo warranto process as it’s known in February, and has since reviewed more than 30,000 documents and data from the St. Louis City Circuit Court and St. Louis Comptroller’s Office, according to a press release from the Attorney General’s Office.

What prompted the state Attorney General to take action against Gardner was a horrific incident in February involving 21-year-old Daniel Riley.

Riley had been charged in an August 2020 armed robbery but was released on bond and then, despite repeatedly violating the terms of his release, was still on the streets in February 2023 when he was speeding in an Audi SUV, failed to yield at an intersection and caused a crash that led to a teenage volleyball player from Tennessee — who was in St. Louis for a tournament, and just happened to be on the sidewalk at the time of the crash — having both of her legs amputated.

While it is perhaps predictable that Missouri’s Republican attorney general would be trying to force Gardner out of office, even Democrats in St. Louis have now started turning against her. A local defense attorney, David Mueller, has announced himself as a Democratic primary challenger to Gardner, and other local Democrats are also expected to toss their hats into the ring. And last week, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Michael Noble denounced Gardner’s office as a “rudderless ship of chaos” in a hearing on whether she should be held in contempt of court. “It appears that Ms. Gardner has complete indifference and a conscious disregard for the judicial process,” he said.

Gardner’s campaign received about $116,000 from political action committees backed by billionaire George Soros. We are told that identifying Soros as a funder of liberal DAs is promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but the question is, do Jews actually support this dangerous “progressive” lunacy? If not, then it is incumbent on Jews to denounce Soros — and indeed, many have done so loudly — and to stop this baseless smear of Soros’ critics. How is it a “conspiracy theory” to point out how Soros is spending his money to affect elections? And if the Anti-Defamation League really wants to discourage anti-Semitism, why aren’t they criticizing Soros, rather than defending him? Because I think every decent citizen — Jew or Gentile, black or white, Republican or Democrats — should consider Soros indefensible, given the results he has obtained in St. Louis and other cities where his money has helped elect “progressive” prosecutors like Kim Gardner, who remains unapologetic:

Gardner shrugged off the ongoing court battle to remove her from office as “a witch hunt” designed to discourage young reformers from going to law school or pursuing a career in the criminal justice arena.
“I’m not leaving. I’m not resigning. I’m not doing nothing,” she said to rousing cheers. “You gonna have to remove me.” . . .
Gardner walked out of the Central Baptist Church Saturday morning after delivering a defiant 13-minute speech to about 60 loyal supporters who awarded her with a t-shirt and heralded her as “the Mother of Justice.” . . .
“I’ve been criminalized every day because of my black skin, because I’m Black,” she said. “I’ve never had a fair shake.”

Playing the race card? Really? Despicable to the end . . .

'I ain’t leaving': Soros-backed prosecutor Kim Gardner refuses to step down from 'rudderless ship of chaos' https://t.co/R4OqOws48h via @americanwire_

— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) April 30, 2023

“The circuit attorney's office appears to be a rudderless ship of chaos. Kim Gardner is the Circuit Attorney, and it is her duty to manage the caseload of each staff member. Chris Desilets has approximately 104 felony cases. Any prudent practitioner would expect such a caseload… pic.twitter.com/tbfMqCbTRc

— FOX2now (@FOX2now) April 27, 2023

 

Say hello to 51-year-old Missouri resident Jeremy Garnier, who in March 2020 decided it would be a good idea to dress up as comic-book villain The Joker and record a livestream threatening to kill a thousand people. Last week, he was sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years of probation for making terrorist threats. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that (a) Garnier has a lengthy history of previous crimes (b) which he claims he committed to “in order to support his crack habit.”

Is the world getting crazier, or is it just that now we have social-media that allows people to broadcast their craziness?

 

Perhaps the CDC should issue guidelines on this subject, although most expectant mothers probably don’t need to be told this: Engaging in armed carjacking is not recommended during pregnancy.

This is a story told in three headlines:

Suspect hospitalized following
officer-involved shooting in KCMO
— KCTV

Witness says Kansas City police
fired at woman running from officers
in parking lot
— Kansas City Star

Kansas police shoot
pregnant Black woman five times
despite having her hands up: witness
— Raw Story

Notice how the headline changes from one story to the next, even though the facts (known or alleged) are the same in all three stories.

According to police, there was a report of an armed carjacking in Kansas City, Kansas, with the dispatcher broadcasting a detailed description of the stolen vehicle, including the license plate number. On the other side of the Missouri River, in Kansas City, Missouri, police located the vehicle in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store about 8 p.m. Friday:

Two police vehicles with two officers approached the suspect vehicle.
At that point, the male driver ran away northeast and two officers pursued.
The female passenger in the suspect vehicle, identified as 26-year-old Leonna Hale, then got out and fled into the parking lot.

That’s from the KCTV report, published just two hours after the Friday night shooting. By Sunday evening, the Kansas City Star had this:

A witness said a woman had her hands up moments before she was shot multiple times by Kansas City police officers Friday night in a store parking lot. Shédanja, who declined to provide her last name, said the woman was trying to run from officers when they fired at her. . . .
Shédanja, 29, said she went to the store with her three children to get gasoline and ice cream.
She heard officers start yelling, “Get out the car,” to two people who were in the vehicle next to hers. A man exited, jumped a fence and ran. Three officers chased after him, she said.
The woman exited the car with her hands up, Shédanja said. Officers told the woman to get on the ground, but the woman told them she was pregnant, Shédanja said, and couldn’t get down on the ground.
Police asked her to get down multiple times. The woman then told police there was a gun in the vehicle. The woman started backing toward a fence in the parking lot. Several officers approached her and had their weapons drawn, Shédanja said.
“She did not pull out a weapon on them,” she said. “She did not even have a stick in her hand.”
The woman ran three steps away from officers, Shédanja said, and police shot five times.

If this account is accurate, certainly it seems like a “bad shoot,” as they say, and the state police have been called in to investigate.

Why does Raw Story feel it necessary to insert the racial angle in their headline? We don’t know the race of the officers involved in this shooting, but the interim police chief in Kansas City,  Joseph Mabin, happens to be black, and he has promised that his department will cooperate fully with the state police investigation.

What we know, per Missouri State Highway Patrol: A woman was shot. A 'suspect' gun was found in the parking lot. Was the woman armed, I asked. The reply was pretty interesting. KCPD officers were the only ones to fire shots. The woman was taken to a hospital in stable condition. pic.twitter.com/EF83f1LpaL

— Toriano Porter (@torianoporter) May 28, 2022

Probably there will be policy bodycam and/or dashcam video of this incident, as well as store surveillance video of the parking lot. If such videos are available, then we won’t have to rely on the testimony of Shédanja or any other witnesses to know what happened.

It does not seem, based on what we’ve been told so far, that this shooting was justified, but it seems safe to assume that Chief Mabin is not engaged in a cover-up of a racially-motivated crime. Therefore, all we need to do is wait for the state police to complete their investigation, then the facts will be completely known. Regardless of what the facts may turn out to be, in regard to the shooting, what will be most interesting to learn is why a pregnant woman was a passenger in this vehicle, which was reportedly stolen in an armed carjacking. Did she know it was stolen? Was she a participant in the alleged carjacking? The backstory of this crime must be fascinating, so I’ll try to remember to update if and when we learn it.

 

Say hello to Harrison Foster of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. This is a mugshot from 2008, after Foster was arrested for robbing pharmacies and the judge ordered a “mental evaluation” that sent him to “Fulton State Hospital’s maximum security lockdown.” Foster was 21 at the time, and I don’t know what the results of the “mental evaluation” were, but they didn’t keep him lockdown. Perhaps they should have, because somewhere along the line, Foster hooked up with Brittany Wilson.

The best relationships are built on common interests, and it appears that Foster and Wilson had a common interest in methamphetamine.

Which is how the couple decided to celebrate Christmas Eve:

A Missouri woman was pictured with a bright smile on her face after being charged with killing her fiance with a sword on Christmas Eve after the couple was high on meth.
Brittany Wilson, 32, was found outside the Cape Girardeau home she shared with 34-year-old Harrison Stephen Foster with blood on her clothing and a sword lying in the front yard.
Wilson had called police shortly after 11p.m. Friday to report that she had killed Foster with a sword, cops said.
She told investigators that she believed he had several other entities living in his body, and she was setting him free by stabbing him, police said
After officers arrested Wilson, they went inside the home and found Harris dead with several fresh stab wounds.
Wilson told police that she and Foster had taken methamphetamine earlier in the day at the home located about 115 miles south of St. Louis.
Officers say she claimed that Foster was harvesting body parts from individuals.
In the mug shot released Saturday, an orange jumpsuit-clad Wilson, who has two children, wore a wide smile. Foster isn’t believed to be the father of the two kids.

She seems nice. Be careful who you’re doing with meth with, and maybe it’s not a good idea to leave swords laying around while you’re out of your mind on meth. Remember: Crazy People Are Dangerous.