Wife can't grasp attack
A local principal doesn't know what pushed her husband to kill in Missouri.
By MELANIE AVE and THOMAS C. TOBIN, Times Staff Writers
Published February 9, 2008
She cannot explain what came over her husband, the man who carried a grudge and guns to City Hall on Thursday in a Missouri suburb and killed five people before police shot him dead.
Maureen C. Thornton, principal at John Hopkins Middle School in St. Petersburg, said she feels only sadness for the men and women killed by her husband, Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton.
"I do not condone violence, and only God knows what motivates persons to take actions such as what occurred," Thornton wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times on Friday.
She said her family is also shocked and grieving.
The couple had been married 12 years and appeared to live separately since Mrs. Thornton took a job with the Pinellas school system in 2004.
"While I do not make excuses for Cookie," Mrs. Thornton wrote en route to St. Louis from St. Petersburg, "he is my husband and a valued, loving member of our family and he will be sorely missed."
The Kirkwood, Mo., City Council had just finished the Pledge of Allegiance on Thursday night when Charles Thornton, 52, burst into the meeting, shouted "Shoot the mayor!" and opened fire.
Thornton, who had a series of long-standing grudges against the city, left a one-line note on his bed before the shootings. It warned, "the truth will come out in the end," according to his brother, Arthur Thornton, 42.
Last month, Charles Thornton lost a federal free-speech lawsuit against Kirkwood, a quaint, tree-lined suburb of older homes about 7 miles southwest of the St. Louis city limits.
He frequently showed up at council meetings, shouting obscenities and showing a side that friends and relatives say was unlike his amiable personality outside of City Hall. Over the years he had racked up more than $18,000 in fines against his small demolition and asphalt business.
Those who knew him said his dispute with Kirkwood began when the city began issuing parking citations to Thornton for illegally parking construction equipment. Later, he was twice convicted of assaulting Kirkwood public works director Kenneth Yost, one of his victims Thursday night.
In a federal lawsuit stemming from his arrests during two meetings just weeks apart, Thornton insisted that Kirkwood officials violated his constitutional rights to free speech by barring him from speaking at the meetings. But a judge in St. Louis tossed out the lawsuit Jan. 28, writing that "any restrictions on Thornton's speech were reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and served important governmental interests."
Family members speculated that losing the lawsuit may have sent Thornton over the edge.
"My brother went to war tonight with the government that was putting torment and strife in his life," his brother Gerald Thornton said in an interview broadcast on CNN. "And he has spoken on it many times in the courts and they denied him all access to the rights of protection, so he took it upon himself to go to war."
The city's tickets were "eating at him," said Ron Hodges, a friend.
"He felt that as a black contractor he was being singled out," said Hodges, who is black. "I guess he thought mentally he had no more recourse. That's not an excuse."
Thornton sometimes would frame his complaints in racial terms, saying the city had a "plantation mentality." Some council members were afraid of him and recently had a police officer posted outside meetings as a result, said Franklin McCallie, a friend and longtime principal of Kirkwood High School.
"When it came to the City Council, he just became a different person," McCallie said.
Charles Thornton's ex-wife, Marilyn Thomas, 55, of West Palm Beach said she had not been in touch with him in years but was surprised he had the ability to kill.
"He and I had our differences, but he was not that kind of person when I knew him," said Thomas, the mother of his 17-year-old daughter, who also had little contact with Thornton. "He was basically a good-hearted person. He had a great personality. A Christian man. I would never have thought something like this would take hold of him."
Besides Yost, Thornton's victims were identified as Officer Tom Ballman, Sgt. William Biggs and council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr.
The city's mayor, Mike Swoboda, was hospitalized in critical condition, and Suburban Journals reporter Todd Smith was shot in the hand but was listed in satisfactory condition.
Although Charles and Maureen Thornton remain married, several faculty members at John Hopkins said the couple was estranged. They said Mrs. Thornton broke down in tears last school year at a faculty meeting, saying she was divorcing her husband.
Maureen Thornton, 49, joined the school district in February 2004, having worked for 19 years as an educator in the St. Louis area. She left her job as assistant principal at a Ballwin, Mo., middle school in December 2003 and landed a job teaching at John Hopkins in St. Petersburg.
By the fall of 2004, she was an assistant principal at Safety Harbor Middle School and in 2005 became principal at John Hopkins, a performing arts and communications magnet.
Mrs. Thornton has received good evaluations from her supervisors in Pinellas, just as she did in Missouri, where the principal she worked under for four years said she had "great rapport with kids."
Records show financial problems in St. Petersburg and in Missouri were mounting.
The Internal Revenue Service filed two tax liens against Charles Thornton last year, one for $17,539 and the other for $195,241.
Last month, foreclosure proceedings had begun on the home owned by Mrs. Thornton and her husband's brother, Arthur. Records show the two have jointly owned a home at 701 Lake Maggiore Blvd. S since January 2007.
Arthur Thornton originally bought the 3600-square-foot home in March 2005 for $200,000 but added Mrs. Thornton to the mortgage. The mortgage grew to $352,750.
A neighbor, Phyllis Campbell, said she saw Charles Thornton and his mother about a month ago, saying they both seemed nice.
In her e-mail, Maureen Thornton expressed sympathy on behalf of her family to the victims' families for "their grievous loss."
"As a community," she wrote, "we must find ways to reach out to each other to avoid the senseless violence and prejudices that plague our community."
Times researcher Angie Drobnic-Holan and staff writer Waveney Moore contributed to this report, which also used information from the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.