A man and a woman pointed their semi-automatic rifle and pistol at a group of protesters in St. Louis moving through their neighborhood calling for the resignation of the city’s mayor.
A video that went viral Sunday evening showed Mark and Patricia McCloskey, reportedly identified as two personal injury lawyers by the River Front Times, held up their firearms and shouted at demonstrators passing their mansion in a private, gated community.
Patricia, seen wearing black pants and a black-and-white striped shirt, at one point crosses the lawn with her pistol while her husband Mark, dressed in a pink-collared shirt with khakis, stands in the yard. The McCloskeys bought their large home in 1988, according to St. Louis Magazine.
here’s what happens when you march on Portland Place in St. Louis, MO
they’re scared of their own community pic.twitter.com/Ng8qW1Pa6C
— avery (@averyrisch) June 29, 2020
The demonstrators were marching toward the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is facing intense backlash after broadcasting personal information of her constituents calling to defund the police.
Krewson apologized after revealing the personal information of her constituents during a public briefing.
“In an effort to be transparent and accessible to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, for more than three months now, I have been doing tri-weekly community updates on Facebook. Tonight, I would like to apologize for identifying individuals who presented letters to me at City Hall as I was answering a routine question during one of my updates earlier today,” Krewson said in a statement on Friday. “While this is public information, I did not intend to cause distress or harm to anyone.”
The video of the “community update” was removed, but the Washington Examiner obtained a copy. Near the end of the briefing, Krewson’s spokesman Jacob Long read a question from a woman named Rachel.
“Rachel has a question, mayor, about your meeting today with some demonstrators outside City Hall,” Long said. “She wants to know: How was that meeting, and what did you talk about?”
“Well, thank you for that, Rachel,” Krewson said. “So, there was a demonstration here, in front, sort of on Tucker and Market here, and the demonstrators wanted to meet with me. So, I went outside City Hall in the circle on the Tucker side of City Hall. The conversation wasn’t really a two-way conversation. I’ll be honest with you because there was a very loud, um, very loud response from the demonstrators. And so, they gave me some papers about how they thought, uh — in fact, I’ll go pick it up off my desk, hang on.”
Krewson then walked away from the camera to grab papers, and when she returned, the mayor read funding demands from several people.
“I agree with all these things, by the way,” Krewson said in regard to police reform. “Except we’re not going to take all the money from the police. I think we need our police department.”
