The St. Louis man who emerged from his house with a rifle after he said rioters broke through his private gate is a lawyer who takes on civil rights cases against the police.
Mark McCloskey confronted Black Lives Matter protesters outside his home on Sunday while his wife, Patricia, stood next to him armed with a pistol.
Based on the couple’s account, police labeled the incident a case of trespassing and assault by intimidation, according to the incident summary. No other police reports were filed that night, a department spokesperson told Fox News.
Mark McCloskey told KMOV-TV that a mob rushed toward the home as the family was having dinner and “put us in fear of our lives.”
“This is all private property. There are no public sidewalks or public streets,” McCloskey said. “We were told that we would be killed, our home burned and our dog killed. We were all alone facing an angry mob.”
Reports noted that no agency or any other organization of people came to the aid of Mark and Patricia McCloskey who are personal injury attorneys.
Mark McCloskey noted that he appears as an attorney in civil rights cases, and that he is currently representing a man who was allegedly beaten by police:
"I do civil rights cases. Right now, I’m representing a young man who was assaulted by the police who is sitting in prison right now for being involved in a car accident after which the police came in and assaulted him. It’s on video. I’m not some kind of extreme, you know, anti- Black Lives Matter guy. I do these cases. I have been doing them for decades. I mean, I have on the wall of my conference room, I’ve got an anti-slavery broadsheet, the abolitionist broadsheet from 1832. It’s been there as long as I’ve owned this building. I mean, I’m not I’m not the enemy of people that really care about the Black lives, but I’m apparently the enemy of the terrorists and the Marxists that are running this organization."
McCloskey added that the attention devoted to Black Lives Matter has distracted from criminal violence in St. Louis.
“There is mayhem in the city every night. You never hear about it. There’ll be dozens of shootings, multiple deaths. No one seems to care about those black lives,” McCloskey said.
During a Monday interview with KSDK News's 5 On Your Side, McCloskey said:
We came back to the house. I don’t know what time it is, I’ve been up ever since. I’m a little, I’m a little blurry, but we were preparing dinner. We went out to the east patio, open porch that faces Kingshighway on one side and Portland Place Drive on the south, and we’re sitting down for dinner. We heard all this stuff going on down on Maryland Plaza. And then the mob started to move up Kingshighway, but it got parallel with the Kingshighway gate on Portland Place.
Somebody forced the gate, and I stood up and announced that this is private property. Go back. I can’t remember in detail anymore. I went inside, I got a rifle. And when they … because as soon as I said this is private property, those words enraged the crowd. Horde, absolute horde came through the now smashed down gates coming right at the house. My house, my east patio was 40 feet from Portland Place Drive.
And these people were right up in my face, scared to death. And then, I stood out there. The only thing we said is “this is private property. Go back. Private property. Leave now.” At that point, everybody got enraged. There were people wearing body armor. One person pulled out some loaded pistol magazine and clicked them together and said that you were next. We were threatened with our lives, threatened with a house being burned down, my office building being burned down, even our dog’s life being threatened. It was, it was about as bad as it can get. I mean, those you know, I really thought it was Storming the Bastille that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a huge and frightening crowd. And they were they broken the gate were coming at us.
Free Press International
