Authorities have reportedly confiscated a rifle while serving a search warrant late Friday at the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who made nationwide headlines late last month after they defended themselves with guns from activists who marched through their private neighborhood.
St. Louis police officers reportedly “seized one of the weapons, the rifle, from the couple and they told police their attorney has the pistol seen in photos,” according to news outlet KSDK, citing anonymous sources. Several of the protesters can be heard hurling threats at the couple.
Fox News host Shannon Bream confirmed the news. In a Twitter post, Bream wrote that Fox News had obtained a photo of the warrant. The news station later published a report showing the photo, as well as another photo of what appears to the the seized rifle at the residence.
BREAKING: Warrant reportedly served on St. Louis couple who stood outside their home with weapons as protesters approached. We're told weapon(s) seized. We've got the warrant and pictures for you at 11p – PLUS, Missouri @AGEricSchmitt joins us LIVE @FoxNews @FoxNewsNight
— Shannon Bream (@ShannonBream) July 11, 2020
No arrest or charges were reported at the residence as of late Friday. Law enforcement have stated that the couple was acting within their rights but the Democrat prosecutor has said the couple acted illegally.
Mark McCloskey, 63, and his wife, Patricia McCloskey, 61, were seen in footage widely circulated on social media outside their residence in St. Louis on June 28, telling a group of people to move on past their home. McCloskey wielded a rifle while his wife held up a handgun.
Protesters were heading toward the home of Democratic St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, who lives in the same neighborhood, to demand that she resign, after Krewson read the names and addresses of activists who submitted complaints to entirely defund the city’s police department.
Krewson said she wouldn’t defund the department and later apologized for reading their names on Facebook Live.
Albert Watkins, the couple’s lawyer, said that there were bad actors among the Black Lives Matter demonstrators on June 28.
He told news outlets: “Their actions were borne solely of fear and apprehension, the genesis of which was not race-related. In fact, the agitators responsible for the trepidation were white.”
“Bad things were said. They weren’t the message of Black Lives Matter. They were threats. They were hostile…my clients weren’t there with guns. [Mark McCloskey] went in and got his guns … these two people have spent a career serving and addressing the civil rights needs of people of color. [They] were not frightened of peaceful protesters.”
Watkins also said, “The Black Lives Matters movement is here to stay, it is the right message, and it is about time.”
The McCloskeys, who are Democrats themselves, “want to make sure no one thinks less of BLM, its message, and the means it is employing to get its message out because of the actions of a few white individuals who tarnished a peaceful protest,” he said.
Private Security
Protesters had returned to the McCloskeys’ neighborhood on July 3, but they had hired private security in advance.
The Black Lives Matter protesters stopped at the gate near the McCloskeys’ home for around 15 minutes but did not go over, video footage appear to show. The protesters were heard taunting and heckling the couple. The couple were not seen in the incident on July 3.
The Associated Press reported that inside their gate, “more than a dozen men in plain clothes walked the grounds and peered out from a second-floor balcony of the couple’s home,” adding that one protester appeared to try to jump over the gate but didn’t.
‘Angry Mob’
The McCloskeys are both personal injury lawyers and active Democrat donors who support the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement. They said that on June 28, they were having a family dinner outside their home when an angry mob broke through the wrought iron gates into the private neighborhood.
“A mob of at least 100 smashed through the historic wrought iron gates of Portland Place, destroying them, rushed towards my home where my family was having dinner outside, and put us in fear of our lives,” Mark McCloskey told KMOV.
–Wire services
