The St. Louis couple that went viral late last month after drawing guns on protesters marching through their gated neighborhood say they faced death threats by demonstrators who threatened to take over their home.
Patricia McCloskey said she heard protesters, who were marching to demand the resignation of St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, talk about how they wanted to take over their home, kill her and her husband, Mark, and their dog.
“That they were going to kill us,” she told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday when asked about the threats leveled against them. “They were going to come in there. They were going to burn down the house. They were going to be living in our house after I was dead. They pointed to different rooms and said, ‘That’s going to be my bedroom, and that’s going to be the living room, and I’m going to be taking a shower in that room.’ … There were so many threats. Then, the dog barked, and they said, ‘I’m going to be killing her, too,’ or ‘it, too.'”
The McCloskeys, who are white, have defended their actions to arm themselves on multiple media networks. Mark McCloskey has said he supports the Black Lives Matter movement, which has experienced a resurgence amid the protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.
Mark McCloskey said the community helped them put up a gate in front of their home because they heard people may be coming back into the area after the initial viral confrontation. He said the couple struggled to get security or help in defending their property because of how controversial the incident had become.
“We got a tip that the people were coming back, and they were coming back specifically for us and to get us and to burn the house,” Mark McCloskey said. “And so we started trying to get private security. We had been told that the city police have been ordered to stand down. We had been told that there was going to be no official help. Our neighborhood association put out a flier saying that, if people broke in, they were just going to let them. And so we started trying to hire private security. Entity after entity said they didn’t want to get involved. Thursday afternoon, we started hiding valuables and securing the house. The last group of security people … these were special forces guys, told us they couldn’t do it and we should just walk away from the house and abandon it. We just said we weren’t going to do that.”
The incident drew a mix of widespread criticism and support for the McCloskeys’ choice to arm themselves in the face of protests described by many outlets as peaceful.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat, announced last week that she was investigating the McCloskeys, adding that she was “alarmed” by what she had seen. Gardner defended the protesters, saying they were met with “violent assault” when the McCloskeys decided to brandish guns.
