A St. Louis Police Detective refused to sign at least two versions of a prosecutor’s probable cause statement regarding Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple that waved guns at Black Lives Matter protesters after they trespassed on their gated community in June.
Here are two versions of the statements lead investigator Sgt. Curtis Burgdorf refused to sign with the parts that were changed highlighted in yellow:
Documents obtained by KSDK include an email from Assistant Circuit Attorney Chris Hinckley, a member of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s, sent to Burgdorf. Hinckley emailed police the day before the McCloskeys were served with a search warrant, writing that it needed to happen “now.”
“At this point, everything points to these weapons being real and loaded, but no one has asked or confirmed,” he wrote. “Come trial, they’ll say they were waiving around a BB gun and an air rifle.”
Some the phrases investigators were able to decipher from video footage of the protesters include:
“You own a business. Your business is gone.”
“We coming back baby.”
“You ain’t the only (expletive) with a gun.”
“They coming back to your house.”
Burgdorf also wrote that a male protester was heard saying of the confronatation with the McCloskeys, “I was in front so I was the one who opened the gate. The gate was broken after they pulled a gun. What law did we break? We keep guns there but not for show though. Not to look a certain way, but for use. If they would’ve shot then they would’ve been put down.”
None of those statements appear to have made it into the initial versions of the statements. The statements also describes the gate to the private community as being “open” when protesters happened upon it.
We reported last week that a member of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s staff ordered the gun of Patricia McCloskey stripped down and reassembled to make it operable, and therefore illegal. It was previously inoperable.