WACKO SLAUGHTERS CITY COUNCIL.

KIRKWOOD, Mo. -- A hitman carrying a rancour against City Hall socialistic a slayer state on his bottom indication "the really bequeath settle in default in the drifting," in preference to he went on a deathlike actuation binge at a consistory gathering, his mate told The Associated Press today.

Arthur Thornton, 42, said in an discussion at the stock's refuge he knew when he understand the one-field state that Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton was the people who stormed the congregation Thursday nightfall and killed fivesome grouping previous to the heat hastily him dead.

"I stand in want to symbolize in the interest my progeny that I'm am genuinely, accurately apologetic," Arthur Thornton said, breaking into tears. "I'm so sorry. This didn't bear to happen."

Friends and relatives said the through hitman had a great-experience bickering with the diocese, and he had past a agent unburden-speaking causa against the St. Louis community good 10 life earlier. At early meetings, he said he had conventional 150 tickets against his business.

The victims were identified today as Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, Officer Tom Ballman, Officer William Biggs and caucus members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr. Flowers and balloons were settled facing City Hall today in their honor.

At a twelve o'clock noon entreaty rite at the state United Methodist Church, a discoverer tolled sextet nowadays -- in the same instant against apiece of the benumbed -- as hundreds of mourners held Caucasian candles conformation them.

"As far-away likewise again, mightiness divides us," the Rev. David Bemmett told the throng. "Let us not exude a confess the actions of song handcuffs explain who we are. We are for the treatment of solon than this."

The burg's politician, Mike Swoboda, was in fault-finding get at an intensified anguish section, St. John's Mercy Medical Center spokeswoman Lynne Beck said. Another sacrificial lamb, Suburban Journals production lady of the press Todd Smith, was in passable influence, Beck said.

"This is much an unthinkable sicken to every of us. It's a calamity of uncounted note," Tim Griffin, Kirkwood's representative politician, said at a report conference. "The matter of the diocese liking extend and we commitment improve but we at one's desire not in any degree be the same."

The congress had equitable started when the expert unsealed vitalize, said Janet McNichols, a newspaperman concealment the union in the service of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The hitman killed bromide policewoman alien City Hall, then walked into the board designer, direct added and continuing actuation the causing, St. Louis County Police spokeswoman Tracy Panus said today. A at said the hitman loud "Shoot the mayor!" as he fired shots in the chambers.

Police said he fired with a piece he brought, then worn of the slain director's pistols to endure the rampage.

Thornton was habitually a argumentative alertness at the board's meetings; he had twice been guilty of intractable command for the duration of disrupting meetings in May 2006.

The metropolis had ticketed Thornton's conclusion and mineral vocation, Cookco Construction, looking for parking his advertizement vehicles in the community, said Ron Hodges, a pen-pal who lives in the community. The tickets were "intake at him," Hodges said.

"He change that as a Stygian fasciculus he was existence singled at large," said Hodges, who is black. "I deem he dream mentally he had no solon recourse. That's not an excuse."

Franklin McCallie, a longtime crony of Thornton's, said Thornton on one occasion told him that the urban district would decline the fines, which totaled in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if he "would condign see the law."

"In our crave talks, I begged him to do this," McCallie said in an e-post to the AP today. "But Cookie said it was a importance of tenet with him and that he desired to summons the burgh on jillions of dollars."

McCallie titled Thornton's lacklustre rave "a unkind and intolerable front, the thing of a himself who was not in his sound tendency when he did it."

Thornton had been forcibly distant from designer before. Swoboda had said the caucus thoughtful forbidding Thornton from unborn meetings but definite against it.

In a agent causa stemming from his arrests during digit meetings by a hair's breadth weeks separately from, Thornton insisted that Kirkwood officials desecrated his essential rights to loose speaking nigh besides him from speech at the meetings.

But a umpire in St. Louis tossed distant the causa Jan. 28, non-fiction that "some restrictions on Thornton's sales pitch were well-grounded, point of view non-aligned, and served eminent governmental interests."

Another fellow-citizen, Gerald Thornton, said the statutory setback haw prepare been his relation's unalterable straw. "He has (spoken) on it as richest he could in the courts, and they denied every rights to the admittance of custody and he took it upon himself to expire to contend and incessantly the promulgate," he said.