Legal Docs: St. Louis Prosecutor Tampered With Evidence In McCloskey Gun Case

Except video posted and interviews with the couple show the crowd was not being threatening until weapons were added into the equation. If people were marching past my home my first instinct would not be to grab my FN and point it at them unless they were trying to enter my home (as per the statutes in my state).

 

It will be interesting to see if it goes to trial, the prosecution and will work overtime to distance one mob from another, to claim this mob, that broke, and each and ever single one of them entered the broken, is not going to shoot 8 year old girls, or beat a women with a 2X4...

 

So someone just believing they are threatened — even if they are not — is a substantial enough metric to justify deadly force?

 

But they were threatened, as there was a mob of people inside private property while there had been city wide violence, theft and destruction. How would you not feel threatened?

 

I insist on sitting outside my home, anywhere on my property I choose. I will only say it once to the Party of Treason, "get off my property."

 

We have had protests in my city, I sat in a diner having lunch and watched them march by. They were loud and annoying but I never felt threatened.

The videos I have seen posted from the altercation doesn’t show any threats until weapons were introduced, if you have a video showing the crowd being threatening I will be happy to review it and change my view if the facts align with an actual threat.

People marching doesn’t threaten me.

 

You have confederates marching outside your home?
Strange, you should call someone.

 

You keep bringing up that strawman. The truth is that they DID NOT use deadly force. Had they actually fired on the "mob", I would agree 100% that they would likely be in the wrong if they were not actually in danger. You keep acting as if they shot at someone or killed someone. They did not. Brandishing weapon to discourage others from acting violently is not acting violently in itself.

 

It is actually the literal definition of brandishing.

It isn’t a strawman but rather a disagreement on pulling a weapon on someone.

I have been trained to only pull if I intend to fire in evidence of a deadly threat
You have apparently been trained that weapons are a prop

 

See previous post. Feeling scared isn't enough, otherwise you could just shoot whoever you want and just claim you felt scared. And their stories conflict. One minute she says she needed her gun because she feared for her life, the next they try claiming it was a non-working gun. Which is it. You'll also recall that I have no complaints about them HAVING their guns or even holding them. My problem was when she pointed it at people who apparently posed no real threat, finger on the trigger. Any gun owner who supports that has some serious brushing up to do.

 

Two distinct differences:
1. I'm betting that diner wasn't behind a gate, so they weren't marching on private property.
2. The only things of yours at risk were whatever was on your person and perhaps a vehicle and its contents.

We cannot know for certain what was going on in the heads of people, but considering the circumstances it is completely reasonable that they felt threatened. They did nothing wrong.

 

Ok that is good. Good clarification.thanks

 

Those stories don't contradict each other. I'm sorry, a mob on private property in an affluent and gated community pose a threat, especially when the city had seen so much turmoil.

 

Did you watch the video? Pretty ****ing sure they threatened to burn down their house and kill their dog. You must not have watched the video. You couldn't have. If you did, you wouldn't have actually typed that out.

"Once through the gate, the victims advised the group that they were on a private street and trespassing and told them to leave. The group began yelling obscenities and threats of harm to both victims. When the victims observed multiple subjects who were armed, they then armed themselves and contacted police.

"This is all private property. There are no public sidewalks or public streets. We were told that we would be killed, our home burned and our dog killed. We were all alone facing an angry mob."

The fact that a rational person could watch that video and say that the mob was peaceful and that they should have invited them in for dinner just absolutely baffles me.

Like how did you make it to adulthood being that oblivious?

 

Did you?

 

1: you are correct, I do not know the legal issues surrounding private property laws in gated communities — there is some debate as to who has lawful possession of the community areas and if trespass onto those areas can be constituted as being an imminent threat. I would hope that the police reviewed those legal issues prior to charging the couple.

2: I would feel much more exposed sitting feet away from a crowd than I would behind the door to my home.


I disagree that they did nothing wrong, they brought weapons into a situation where there were none. Weapons should be seen as a method of last response, not a method of first response.

 

You should watch the video @Phyxius posted as it shows a few things:

• The gate was unlocked and thus no vandalism occurred prior to the threats from the couple
• The couple immediately armed themselves in absence of verbal threat from the group
• The woman pointed her weapon at unarmed individuals

Also I am not sure where you are getting they called the police, according to the local dispatch no calls were received during the incident. Do you have a source showing otherwise?

If they were so threatened why didn’t they call police?

 

If it is a reasonable fear it is PLENTY enough and they certainly had a reasonable fear. The criminal mob would not know if the gun was operable. The people posed a reasonable threat stop falsely claiming otherwise. This case will be dropped as an over zealous prosecutor had no business charging them and the especially not charging any of the real criminals.

 

The piece of land the protesters were on actually belongs to the HOA, not the McCloskey's. There is an ongoing lawsuit between them and the HOA where the McCloskey's are trying to claim the land under squatter's rights. Mr. McCloskey has brandished a weapon on a neighbor before "defending" the same piece of land.

Mr. McCloskey is a real piece of work, and this did not happen in a vacuum. You should find this article interesting. It's lengthy, but well worth the read...

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local...cle_281d9989-373e-53c3-abcb-ecd0225dd287.html

The McCloskeys have filed at least two “quiet title” suits asserting squatter’s rights on land they’ve occupied openly and hostilely — their terms — and claimed as their own. In an ongoing suit against Portland Place trustees in 2017, the McCloskeys say they are entitled to a 1,143-square-foot triangle of lawn in front of property that is set aside as common ground in the neighborhood’s indenture.

It was that patch of green protesters saw when they filed through the gate. Mark McCloskey said in an affidavit that he has defended the patch before by pointing a gun at a neighbor who had tried to cut through it.

This court record shows the McCloskeys challenged a Portland Place resident “at gun point” who they said encroached on their property.



The McCloskeys have filed many other lawsuits. They sued a man who sold them a Maserati they claimed was supposed to come with a box of hard-to-find parts. In one trip to the courthouse in November 1996, Mark McCloskey filed two lawsuits, one against a dog breeder whom he said sold him a German shepherd without papers and the other against the Central West End Association for using a photo of their house in a brochure for a house tour after the McCloskeys had told them not to.

“I guess we were saving gas,” he would quip in a deposition in another case about why he filed two lawsuits at once.

 

Post where the authorities said the gate was unlocked. Why was it torn down. Did the Mccloskey's know it was unlock or had a reasonable belief it was locked? It was clearly posted private property.

Didn't need a verbal threat to have a reasonable fear altough they received verbal threats.

How would she know if they were armed or not and unarmed people can still destroy property and cause serious bodily harm if not death to someone.

 

See post #170. Whether or not it is even their property is being litigated.

 

Private property of the HOA and controlled by the property owners. It is private property.

 

The video shows it was unlocked and undamaged upon their initial entry. Surely you have at minimum watched the video?

So they didn’t have a verbal threat, didn’t have a physical threat (the woman actually approached the protesters so she wasn’t in fear of her life). What was the threat then?

 

A mob breaking into your private property is a threat. Also, for the 3rd, 4th, 10th? time ( i lost count) them having their guns on their own property is NOT A CRIME.

Did you see who charged them? Did you see how they had to tamper with evidence in order to charge them?

Yeah, no, the law is not on your side....not even close.

 

If I build a fence on my neighbors land, is it my fence or my neighbors?