The blame game in Kirkwood Missouri

Charles (cookie) Thornton went from being an angry thorn in the side of the kirkwood City Council, to a cold blooded , methodical killer in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Lives were lost, others irrevocably changed forever, and a town was torn apart. Make no mistake, there is no justification for what happened. Thornton's brother has made statements which condone and attempt to justify the atrocity committed by his brother. People are outraged and incredulous over his remarks, and rightly so.


As with any violent act committed by a person whose race differs from that of the victim, accusations of racism are flying from both sides of the equation. Thortons brother, family members and some members of the black community in Kirkwood maintain that Thornton was singled out and targeted because he was black. His brother has gone so far to say that the senseless killings were justified , and a retaliatory action in an on going war. Thornton also raised the issue of race, suggesting that African Americans have a more difficult time exerting their rights and that his brother’s race was a factor in his difficulties with the city and in the courts.


You have only to google any combination of search words including Kirkwood, and you will quickly see the other side of the coin. There is no shortage of backwards thinking white race baiters who have jumped on the bandwagon to decry the racially motivated attack of a black man against innocent white people. Here are a couple of examples. Let's not confuse those racist rants from white backwoods rednecks or the idiotic ramblings of the killers brother , as true reflections from mainstream whites or blacks. Race doesn't matter to the main characters in this tragedy.


The fact is that race was irrelevant to the people who mattered most. The victims never stopped to consider the color of their killer. I'm sure dying at the hands a white man would be no less terrifying than it was at the hands of a black man. I doubt the last thoughts going through their minds was Thornton's skin color. The only thing any of the victims cared about or thought of, was how to avoid dying. As for Thorton, it didn't matter to him what color the victims were, in the end the only color he saw was red from a volatile cocktail of insanity and an all consuming urge to kill.


In the days and weeks to come, race will be a main topic regarding the killings in Kirkwood. The media will help fan the flames, people like Nancy Grace will feed on the sensationalism and fuel the fire a little more. The white camp will say " Look, it's another case of black on white crime."


The black camp will raise up and cry "The cards are stacked against the Black man, he was driven to it ."Sadly there is a little truth to both of those statements. But race is only an inconsequential portion of the whole truth of this tragedy. Like the layers of an onion, race is just the outer skin , just a layer or two of this onion of truth.


The truth is both the killer and victims may or not have been racist. That small town city council, may or may not have singled Thorton out, race may have or not played a role. Thorton might have hated white people, or he might just as well have hated people in general. What is certain is that none of the people who could definitively answer how much of a role race played, will ever get the chance. They are just as dead as they can be, and the whole truth of the matter has gone to the grave with them. Whatever loose wiring in Thornton's brain that allowed him to kill defenseless people, was as nondiscriminatory as the bullets that came from his gun. And whatever wrongs Thorton felt had been committed against him cant justify taking a human life, none of the victims did anything to deserve killing.


The curtain has closed on the first act of this tragedy. The main characters have left the stage, never to return. The second and final act will be comprised of those left reeling in the wake of the killings. The town itself will never be the same. Kirkwood will be separated by a racial divide, antagonists from both sides, white and black, will further widen the gap. Rather than come together to mourn, they will mourn separated by skin color, each side blaming the other.


When dealing with the inexplicable we grasp for someone or something to blame. We need a bad guy, someone to point an accusatory finger at. The one true bad guy in all of this is dead and gone.
There isn't much satisfaction or relief in laying all of the blame at the feet of a dead man. So people in Kirkwood and across America, will blame each other. Race will inevitably be the main theme running throughout the blame game, it always is in cases like this. We like to think we have progressed beyond this type of backward thinking, but we haven't, not really. Even the most liberal and forward thinking of us, still has at least a few remaining vestiges of it embedded deep in our psyche. Whether we admit it or not.


In the end there is one twisted bit of irony in all of this. The black killer and the white victims, have gotten past the issues of race, to them race isn't an issue. They are all equally dead. The only winners in this sad tale are the white racists who will blame the incident on an entire race, and the black racists who will do likewise. The one person who is really to blame doesn't care anymore.

The Scariest Guy in the Joint

Time is your biggest enemy in prison. Day to day it slows to a crawl, a release date is just some distant dream seemingly out of reach. So you occupy yourself, you read, you work out, you watch TV, you go to whatever job they assign you . I played handball. The urban legends about federal prisons being some posh resort like place where wise guys sit around eating pasta and drinking Chianti imported by guards , is a load of horse shit. In the 5 years and change I was away I never once met a Mafioso or a Big time criminal of any ethnicity. Most of those guys are in Florence Colorado in super max. The truth is most prison populations are comprised of street level drug dealers, forgers and petty thieves. While it was far from the stone fortress look of a Leavenworth, it wasn’t exactly the Club Fed many people mistakenly believe prisons to be. But I digress.

Handball is racquetball without the racquet. If you are reasonably good at it and your opponent is on the same level of skill then it is fairly physically demanding. More importantly it eats up time. There is a rhythm to it and for a couple of hours a day you manage to get lost in it and you kill time. The best games I played were against a diminutive 50 something white guy we will call Clyde, because that was his name. Clyde looked like a school teacher . He wore plastic framed glasses, he looked like a nerd. But when Clyde took off his shirt the first thing you noticed was that his entire upper torso was covered in ink, and not flowery tatts of birds and hearts with MOM in the center of them. His entire back was covered with a Grim Reaper that appeared to be ripping its way from the inside out. Despite the grim tatts, Clyde was a quiet polite unassuming guy who had one hell of a kill shot. A kill shot is when you hit the ball so low against the wall your opponent cant return it. Clyde could hit it so low it would virtually roll on the return.

I played handball with Clyde for about a year before we ever got around to talking about our sentences or crimes. Asking someone what they are in for is a major faux pas so is talking about the length of your sentence. Eventually you may get to know a guy long enough that the subject will come up. One day Clyde and I were waiting on a court to open up and we got to talking. At some point Clyde mentioned being in a federal lock up in Atlanta when all of the Cubans rioted. Now those riots took place back in the 1980's so I asked him if he had been locked up all of this time. He said yes and that he still had 132 years left to serve. I was ready to leave it at that, I figure anyone who has that much time did something really bad and was best left alone. Besides I didn’t want to tell him the relatively short bit I was serving and run the risk of getting stabbed in the face .But apparently Clyde was feeling talkative and he proceeded to tell me that he had 4 murders on him.

Clyde was a Coke dealer. Clyde’s cousin broke in to his house and took some coke and some cash. Clyde found out he did it, knocked on his door and when his cousin opened the door Clyde shot him, dead. Clyde told me that he stepped over his cousins body and went inside to retrieve his stuff. There on the sofa sat 3 stunned witnesses. Clyde killed them all. It goes without saying that this was a pretty disturbing story. But what was really chilling was the last thing he said to me. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful late spring day, the little blue handballs were making their plunking sound against the walls on the courts. Clyde turned to me and in the same tone of voice you would use discussing the weather he said " I hated killing the other 3, one of them was my ex girlfriend from High School, but they all saw me shoot him, what else could I do?

Clyde was a scary guy. I took up jogging. What else could I do?