As Cardinal season got underway last week, a different season was already in full swing: the sprint to collect signatures to get a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on the Missouri ballot. If pro-choice activists can collect 171,000 signatures, Missourians will get a chance to vote this fall on whether abortion should be legal up until the point of fetal viability. Last Thursday, as a sea of red and white streamed into Busch Stadium, we caught up with Dana Sandweiss, who runs the Access MO political action committee.
A lawsuit filed nearly three years ago on behalf of detainees who say they were wantonly maced in the St. Louis city jail is scheduled to be heard by a jury in July after a federal judge refused to dismiss the case. U.S. District Court Judge Henry Autrey wrote in an order issued on Thursday that the detainees and their attorneys bringing the suit “present evidence of a continuing, widespread, persistent pattern of unconstitutional misconduct by the officers in deliberately violating the constitutional rights of pretrial detainees.”
At 3:30 p.m. on the patio of Earthbound Beer, the sounds of Cherokee Street collide. Strums from Ricky Dortch’s guitar seep through the walls from Yaqui’s on Cherokee and couple with warm-up riffs from Vallie Golde and her band as they set up inside of Earthbound. Mexican ballads blare from car stereos as they pause at Cherokee and Iowa, where the neighborhood’s infamous eclectic electric keyboardist also stands on the corner.
According to a recent batch of internal communications that were sent to KDHX's volunteers and subsequently leaked to the RFT, station leadership would very much like its volunteers to stop leaking its internal communications to the RFT. In a missive sent to KDHX's volunteers late last week, Director of Volunteer Connections Andrea Dunn makes the downright shocking assertion that the station's internal communications "are being shared with the media, namely the RFT" (gasp!), as well as with a group of the station's former volunteers who in the last year were either fired or quit in solidarity with those who were. Dunn takes aim at the "volunteer or volunteers who have continuously not heeded the request for confidentiality" and announces that the station is "actively investigating who may be behind the sharing of our communications."
The City of St. Louis is in a hiring freeze effective March 29 as a result of budgetary concerns and a sharp divide between the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Aldermen. The hiring freeze will also impact raises for city employees. Mayor Tishaura Jones’ announcement of the freeze took some aldermen by surprise.
Proper has brought back its Wallflower poster exhibit for the second year to benefit the Last Prisoner Project and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. CEO and co-founder John Pennington says he wants to set the bar for cannabis companies to go beyond just helping their patients and customers but also the community they’re in by collaborating with the New Growth Horizon Foundation as well as Friends for Good to give back to organizations in need. “The New Growth Horizon Foundation has five main areas of giving: Mental Health & Qualifying Conditions for Medical Marijuana, Criminal Justice & Re-Entry, Education and Employment, Homelessness & Housing, and the Betterment of Missouri,” Pennington says in a statement.
A man was shot and killed Sunday morning in a hotel parking lot near the intersection of highways 170 and 270 in Florissant. A police spokesman confirmed that the shooting took place around 11 a.m. on April 7, 2024, at the Quality Inn (55 Dunn Road, Florissant). Police said a person of interest is now in custody, but could answer no further questions at this time.
A contentious debate that took up more than two hours of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen meeting today led to a tie vote that effectively killed a bill that would make it easier to place shelters for the unhoused in the city. Board Bill 227, sponsored by Ward 7 Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier and co-sponsored by Aldermanic President Megan Green, would reform the city’s plat and petition process for approving shelters. After a lengthy discussion at today’s meeting, seven alders voted in favor of the bill, seven against it, with one person voting present.
Beloved Tower Grove South bar Stella Blues (3269 Morgan Ford Road) is closed indefinitely after fire broke out in the kitchen earlier this afternoon. Bar manager Zoe McKelvie says the south city favorite was open for business when her phone started blowing up around 1:30 p.m., with employees, neighbors and friends all sharing news that the kitchen was engulfed in flames. "Apparently some sort of grease fire broke out in the kitchen," she says.
St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts is reportedly no fan of Corrections Commissioner Jenifer Clemons-Abdullah, yet he’s following her playbook this week after taking flak for a photo of a detainee left in horrendous conditions. On Monday, the RFT reported on the photo that attorney Susan McGraugh snapped of her client, Lamarr Pearson, who was lying on the floor of a jail cell in his own excrement. Pearson is paralyzed, with no control of his bowels.
A second African immigrant accused of holding a woman against her will at a St. Louis church was granted bond today, over the objections of city prosecutors. If Grace Kipendo posts $3,000 and complies with other conditions, he will be free until his felony kidnapping case goes to trial. Kipendo was taken into custody in February after a woman fled the Mount of Olives Ministry in south city, saying she had been held captive in a room there and showing rope marks around her arms and ankles.
One week after Washington University announced it had secured a beloved celebrity to give this year's commencement address, Saint Louis University has upped the ante: The Jesuit university has enlisted a beloved and smoking hot celebrity to give its address. And its choice is also a St. Louis native. Take that, Wash U!
Rising star rapper Sexyy Red was barred from entering a youth rally in St. Louis on Wednesday, reportedly because she smelled like weed. The Youth Empowerment Rally was expected to draw 2,000 students from 20 schools to Chaifetz Arena, according to Fox 2.
When we are first introduced to the protagonist of Monkey Man — who is identified only as “The Kid” (Dev Patel) — he’s taking a savage beating in an underground fight club. Each night, he dons a ragged ape mask and plays the heel, allowing the fan-favorite champion to pummel him into a pulp, all to the enthusiastic cheers of a bloodthirsty crowd. If pressed, the Kid would probably insist that he’s just trying to make a buck in a world where the odds are stacked against the have-nots.
The results are in — and it turns out there's no better place to be a first-time home buyer this year than in St. Louis. That's according to real estate marketplace company Zillow, which analyzed cities across the U.S. with eye towards both affordability and camaraderie. It used the following four metrics to assess the conditions facing first-time buyers in 2024:
Alonzo Harris knows the dangers of St. Louis streets more than most. He's a postal carrier, which means a lot of time on foot, and with a route that extends from Montana to Chippewa, he sees the worst of Dutchtown drivers. "It's like a NASCAR track down Louisiana," he says, smiling as he walks his route at Osage and Louisiana streets.
For the second week in a row, activists, members of the unhoused community and service providers packed City Hall to oppose St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones’ idea to build tiny homes for people who need housing on the site of the city’s former jail. The mayor has suggested the idea without officially settling on it — and it has drawn intense pushback from activists. Last week, the public was cut off and unable to speak on the plandue to a lack of overtime funding for STL TV.
After five days on the lam, officials in St. Charles have captured the escaped bull who was running amok in the city. On March 29 the bull was in a commercial transport trailer that was involved in a highway accident — and apparently took his chance and made his escape. That’s according to the City of St. Charles Animal Shelter, which posted rather pun-filled updates about the fugitive on Facebook.
A 27-year-old man already on probation for assaulting a city sheriff's deputy at the downtown Schnucks is now on even more probation after throwing an unspecified liquid at a St. Louis Circuit Court judge last year. Judge David Mason was riding the MetroLink last October when Deobra Duran Williams threw a brown liquid on the judge, who uses a wheelchair.
Bill Streeter has a simple reason for saying goodbye to the festival he started 14 years ago. "I'm tired," he says. "It's a passion project I don't really feel the passion for anymore."
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