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MARCH 6-12, 2019

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THE LEDE

“I’m here today because I lost Cary eight years ago, down on Eighth and Carter. When Cary died, there was kids outside, and they seen it. At that time, a six-year-old urinated on herself every time she seen the police. So that’s why I said some of that money could go for a concert [for the children] that’s actually in these police shootings, in these communities. They don’t go back down there and check on the little ones.”

PHOTO BY THEO WELLING

TONI TAYLOR, WHOSE SON CARY BALL JR. WAS KILLED BY POLICE, PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE VIGIL TO COMMEMORATE VICTIMS OF POLICE VIOLENCE AT POELKER PARK ON TUESDAY, MAY 25 riverfronttimes.com

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A Police Investigation

e ended up with a lot of stories about police in this issue. Some weeks are like that in St. Louis, where violence, inequality and the role of law enforcement have incredible influence on the city’s narrative. Ironically, in an environment where some argue police are over scrutinized, it’s just as easy for important questions to get lost in the crowd. For this week’s cover story, investigative journalists Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow of the Invisible Institute return to a few of those questions surrounding a south city killing. In partnership with The Intercept, Flowers and Stecklow dig in, and while we may not know every answer, we know a lot more than before they started — and we’re all better off for asking. —Doyle Murphy, editor in chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS Publisher Chris Keating Editor in Chief Doyle Murphy

E D I T O R I A L Digital Editor Jaime Lees Interim Managing Editor Daniel Hill Staff Writer Danny Wicentowski Contributors Cheryl Baehr, Eric Berger, Jeannette Cooperman, Mike Fitzgerald, Andy Paulissen, Justin Poole, Theo Welling, Ymani Wince Columnists Thomas Chimchards, Ray Hartmann Editorial Interns Jack Killeen, Riley Mack A R T

& P R O D U C T I O N Art Director Evan Sult Production Manager Haimanti Germain M U L T I M E D I A A D V E R T I S I N G Advertising Director Colin Bell Account Managers Emily Fear, Jennifer Samuel Multimedia Account Executive Chuck Healy Digital Sales Manager Chad Beck Director of Public Relations Brittany Forrest

COVER The Fatal Tunnel In the city with the highest rate of police killings, open investigations pile up and the family of Cortez Bufford waits for answers Cover and above photo by

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HARTMANN Selective Supremacy Missouri finally trusts the locals with something BY RAY HARTMANN

he nice people who run state government in Missouri have concluded that smaller public entities can no longer be trusted with the big stuff. Local public health departments cannot be trusted with emergency public-health decisions. Local governments, officials and law-enforcement agencies cannot be trusted to enact any rules regarding firearms. Local police cannot be trusted to work with federal authorities on any matter involving federal gun laws. Local prosecutors cannot be trusted to make decisions about who to charge with crimes. (Well, at least not if they happen to be Black, female and viewed by white folks as uppity.) Just this past week, the don’ttrust list grew again. Now, local school districts cannot be trusted to determine the curriculum that’s taught to students, at least not when it comes to the subject of race. The chairs of the legislature’s two Book Learnin’ Committees have demanded that Governor Mike Parson call a special session to address the scourge of “critical race theory.” Their concerns: “It’s going to rile up our Negroes” and, “It’s going to destroy our nation’s Anglo-Saxon heritage.” OK, those are not precisely the words used by Reps. Chuck Basye, R-Rocheport and Cindy O’Laughlin, R-Shelbina, at least not publicly. They’re more like what they were thinking. These two are the perfect spokespersons for endangered Caucasians in Missouri. In 2015, Basye was accused of saluting the Confederate flag while dedicating a tombstone to Confederate soldiers buried on his brother’ farm, although he did deny knowing what a Confederate salute was. As for O’Laughlin,

it is important to note — in observance of the new political correctness on the right — her racist tweets, including one suggesting those protesting for Black lives should be mowed down with a combine, should never be cited to imply that she herself is a racist. Basye and O’Loughlin are hardly alone in having discovered the existential crisis of exposing our public schoolchildren to the wrong sort of messaging. It’s the national talking point du jour among Republicans, albeit one that has special meaning here in Missouri: Left unchecked, liberal educators will be telling our kids that there were not “many fine people on both sides” of the Dred Scott decision. To be fair, Missouri Republicans are just dummies mouthing the culture-war words authored by the ventriloquists at the American Legislative Exchange Council. These are the national folks whose whispered motto — “we do the thinking” — pretty much accounts for why ALEC is the source of a fair percentage of GOP legislation in Missouri. To the extent Missouri Republicans have evolved a philosophy of their own in recent years, it is this: Government closest to home is best, but only when the subject is federal policy, in which case that refers to “states’ rights.” As for matters of state government, it turns out, government closest to home is worst. You see, as one state senator explained to me, cities, counties and other public subdivisions were merely creations of the state government and thus must be regarded as totally subservient. In this view, state governments are all powerful. They lay claim to creating both the larger federal government and the smaller local governments. So they are supreme, at least in the view of people running said state government at any particular moment of time. If that worldview seems comically inconsistent and otherwise meritless, well, that’s because it is. But there are exceptions to the rule, instances in which state politicians are actually willing to defer to local authorities and to respect their autonomy. You know. Like when it comes to paying for stuff.

Here’s your breaking news: Missouri ranks 50th out of 50 states in the percentage that its state government contributes to public education among all sources of revenue. The most recent example came forth through a mild-mannered state audit of education spending. The report — entitled “Elementary and Secondary Education Funding Trends” — gently suggested that Missouri’s state government is “consistently lower than the national average” in its financial support of education. The situation is worse than that. The state audit cited the National Education Association’s (NEA) Ranking of States and Estimates of School Statistics as its source. It found that Missouri ranked 49th among the nation’s 50 states in per-pupil dollars. That 49th place number — attributed as a finding of State Auditor Nicole Galloway’s office — was duly reported by media around the state. But it turns out — from merely visiting the most recent NEA report — that these numbers don’t quite reflect Missouri’s true stature. It’s actually dead last. Yes, here’s your breaking news, such that it is: Missouri ranks 50th out of 50 states in the percentage that its state government contributes to public education among all sources of revenue. Not 49th place. The state audit had cited NEA numbers that it turns out were from 2018-19 rather than the recently published 2019-20 numbers. Using Table C-4, the audit referenced Missouri’s state share of 32.1 percent as ranking in 49th place.

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New Hampshire had edged out the state for last place at 31.2 percent. Perhaps the updated numbers weren’t available at the time the state audit was compiled, but they are now. And yes, Missouri’s new ranking for 2020-21 — from the same NEA source — shows our state has slipped below New Hampshire to last place, with just 30.7 percent of state and local revenues coming from the state. There’s also another point worth noting. A better snapshot of the state’s pathetic abdication of responsibility is found in Table F-4 of the NEA report, which takes into account the federal share spent on the states’ education budget. That’s more accurate, and in Missouri’s case, makes things worse. Using Table F-4, Missouri state government spends just 29.8 percent of the total from all sources, as compared to a national average of 46.7 percent. For those keeping score at home, that translates into Missouri spending a staggering 36 percent less than the average state in its contribution to public education. No matter how one scores it, the state’s failure to support public education is scandalous. Just one example was contained in another part of the NEA data, not referenced in the state audit: Missouri’s public teachers rank 45th among the 50 states in salaries. Now that’s really smart. So it turns out the state auditor was guilty of understatement with this finding: “Missouri school districts consistently rely on local funding at a significantly higher rate than the national average.” You want significance? Here’s significance: The same state politicians who are so high and mighty when it comes to disrespecting the judgment of local governments and their citizens might want to consider looking in the mirror. To the extent a case can be made that Missouri isn’t all that well educated, the problem starts at the top. n Ray Hartmann founded the Riverfront Times in 1977. Contact him at rhar tmann1952@gmail.com or catch him on Donnybrook at 7 p.m. on Thursdays on the Nine Network and St. Louis In the Know with Ray Hartmann from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday thru Friday on KTRS (550 AM).

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NEWS

Judge: Ex-Cop’s Racist Texts Are Fair Game Written by

DOYLE MURPHY

ad news for ex-St. Louis cop Dustin Boone: Federal prosecutors will be able to use his racist texts against him in an upcoming trial. Boone, who is accused of beating a lac undercover officer he mistook for a protester in 2017, was trying to keep the texts hidden from jurors, arguing they had nothing to do with the case and would unfairly make him look bad. But U.S. District Judge Richard Webber swatted away most of the arguments made by Boone’s attorney, Patrick Kilgore, in a ruling handed down last week. This means prosecutors can show Boone’s March 2017 text to fellow St. Louis police fficer Timothy Strain, a two-word slur: “Fuckin n-----s.” And they’ll be able to include the string of texts he wrote to fellow officers and friends about forcing someone who took a “TASER to the fuckin dome” to repeatedly say “I’m a pussy” while crying. Prosecutors will also be able to admit text messages and a log of Facetime calls that the feds say show Boone livestreamed the beating of undercover Detective Luther Hall in September 2017 to his then-girlfriend. Hall was posing as a protester following the acquittal of ex-St. Louis police fficer ason Stoc ley in the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith. niformed officers beat Hall “like Rodney King” during the detective’s arrest, Hall later told investigators. Boone was among five officers charged in the case. officer andy Hays pleaded guilty in 2019 to kicking and beating Hall with a nightstick. Hays’ girlfriend at the time, e officer Bailey Colletta, pleaded guilty the same year to making false statements, admitting she lied to a

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Former police officer Dustin Boone will have to contend with his own words. | DOYLE MURPHY grand jury. ut oone and fficers Christopher Myers and Steven Korte decided to go to trial. Korte was acquitted earlier this year. Myers was acquitted of one charge re-

garding Hall’s beating, but jurors deadlocked on a charge that he smashed Hall’s phone, apparently in hopes of destroying video evidence of the assault. Jurors similarly couldn’t reach a decision on

Pepper Spray Cop Acquitted of Assault

Video showed Olsten calmly sweeping pepper spray deep into the crowd, then lingering as people screamed.

Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

St. Louis officer who was filmed outside Busch Stadium soaking a group of protesters and photographers in pepper spray in 2017 was justified, a St. Louis judge ruled Friday, rejecting testimony from other bystanders who said that the incident was a needless act of aggression. On September 29, 2017, during protests over the acquittal of a former St. Louis cop charged with murder, Officer William Olsten found himself near the center of a chaotic series of events in which several officers tased one man and bodyslammed a reverend — and that’s when Olsten, caught on camera by multiple sources, sprayed a gathering crowd with mace. On Friday, Judge Thom C. Clark acquitted Olsten, who is now a former cop, on three felony assault charges filed in

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Boone. As prosecutors prepare for a second trial of Boone and Myers, they argued that the messages and logs involving Boone’s nowwife should be admitted because he married her in an attempt to prevent her from being forced to testify against him. Webber found the argument persuasive. The judge noted the suspicious timeline of the couple’s nuptials. Ashley Ditto, Boone’s girlfriend at the time, was served by the FBI with a subpoena on August 14, 2018. The next day, she and Boone got a marriage license and married. Boone’s own mother admitted while testifying before the grand jury that she was so surprised by the announcement that she didn’t congratulate the newlyweds at first. Boone’s dad, a former city cop, also testified — after failing to invo e the th Amendment — that he didn’t know about the marriage plans ahead of time, even though the couple lived in his house. Webber writes in his ruling: “The Government has shown by a preponderance of the evidence (1) that Boone married Ditto to prevent her from being compelled to

William Olsten after pepper spraying a crowd outside Busch Stadium. | HEATHER DEMIAN 2019. “While regrettable, unfortunate and concerning that the complaining witnesses experienced the unpleasant effects of the chemicals,” Clark wrote, “defendant’s actions were justified under the circumstances.”

Although video showed Olsten calmly sweeping pepper spray deep into the crowd, and then lingering near the line of people screaming and wiping the chemicals from their eyes, Clark wrote that the presence of verbal threats and two attacks on cops “unlocked the unrest of the crowd,” thereby giving legal justification for Olsten’s use of force even though it harmed those who posed no threat. In his verdict, Clark wrote that in the moments before Olsten’s actions, the crowd had reacted to the arrest of Rev. Darryl Gray, who was flung to the ground, and the tasing of protester Calvin “Cap”

testify against him, (2) that Boone’s marriage to Ditto was intended to procure the Ditto’s unavailability, and (3) that the marriage did procure the unavailability of Ditto.” The night of the attack on Hall, Boone livestreamed an hour of video to Ditto, who responded, “That was SOOOOOO COOL!!!!” Boone’s attorney tried to argue she could have been referring to the kettling and arrest of more than 100 people later that night — an incident that launched more than a dozen lawsuits against the city — but prosecutors pointed out that the kettle happened an hour after her message. Webber did agree to block a few things. A series of text messages between oone and fellow officers about prescription drug use won’t be allowed during the trial. And the judge also won’t let prosecutors use a message from Boone to Myers: “I don’t know if sarge is cool w taking any of that cash. I grabbed the 20s for us but I don’t know how he will Be about it??” Those are too prejudicial, Webber concluded. The judge will allow a YouTube video of Christopher Myers from 2016, footage that prosecutors argue shows

Prosecutors also successfully argued the messages involving Boone’s nowwife should be admitted because he married her in an attempt to prevent her from being forced to testify against him.

Kennedy. These two arrests were examined in detail in an October 2020 RFT cover story. The investigation delved into the city’s prosecution of Gray, highlighting the gaps and questions that arose between available video evidence and the officers’ claims that they were physically attacked by a 63-year-old, 150-pound reverend who was wearing his clerical collar at the time. Gray was charged with resisting arrest — the charges are still pending, his lawyer says — but he’s currently suing the officer who slammed him into the ground, Ronald Vaughan, for alleged civil rights violations. (Vaughan is no longer with the department: In February 2021, prosecutors charged Vaughan with forgery in connection to a fabricated doctor’s note he allegedly submitted to the department to get out of work.) However, in the Olsten case, the judge described the arrests of Gray and Kennedy as “two separate assaults on law enforcement” — though neither man was ever charged with assault. In Clark’s verdict, the officers’ narratives — that Gray and Kennedy had attacked them — served as part of the rationale for acquitting Olsten.

Olsten’s decision to spray everything in front of him with mace, Clark wrote, “immediately followed two separate assaults on law enforcement,” in addition to another person in the group who “threatened bodily harm.” The threat was then increased by “even more numerous, angry individuals converging into the immediate area.” Olsten had not committed any assault, Clark ruled. In the conclusion of the verdict, the judge noted that “when an officer deviates from the oath and willfully abuses his authority, the community’s confidence in law enforcement and the equity of our society are tarnished.” “Respectfully,” Clark wrote, “the court finds that this did not happen here.” After the news of the verdict was announced on Friday, Heather DeMian, a prominent livestreamer and independent journalist who covered the 2017 protests, posted the video she captured that night as Olsten maced her and others. “I wasn’t a protester. I was an independent journalist photographing and livestreaming the protest and asking why they’d used a potentially lethal Taser on a protester,” she wrote. “Olsten maced me with no warning whatsoever … .” n

his habit of trying to conceal his identity and bad acts. Prosecutors will also be able to use a number of Myers’ texts in which he talks about “fighting protesters and “trying to fuck up the bad guy.” The trial is set for June 7. n

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THE BIG MAD Outsider Outrage Pizza pandemonium, Blunt’s noshow and the bitter taste of bad apples compiled by

DANIEL HILL

elcome back to the Big Mad, the RFT’s weekly roundup of righteous rage! Because we know your time is short and your anger is hot: POLICE PROTOCOL: So ex-cop William Olsten walks again. Thanks to a technical error, he’d already slipped an assault charge filed after he and fellow officers got into a shootout in the parking lot of a bar where they were hanging out late one night. And last week, Judge Thomas Clark II bought the story that Olsten feared for his safety in 2017 when he maced a crowd of people outside of Busch Stadium. Like any frightened man, Olsten challenged a protester to a fight, blitzed everyone in sight with a chemical irritant and then calmly strolled around as they choked. In a video taken by independent journalist Heather DeMian, who was sprayed, John Hayden is seen in his pre-chief days walking around as well, with his phone up. We’re not tactical experts here, so forgive us if it looked like any danger to police was minimal and Olsten was simply pissed when he unloaded on nonviolent protesters. Clark wrote that two previous “assaults” on police officers, resulting in two arrests, “unlocked the unrest” of the crowd and Olsten and his colleagues were in danger of being overrun. Witnesses in the crowd, including pastors, say there were assaults, but it was cops doing the dirty work. Officers slammed the Rev. Darryl Gray to the ground for questioning their manhandling of a female pastor and then they tased Calvin “Cap” Kennedy when he came to Gray’s aid, witnesses say. So here’s another take on what happened: Police needlessly roughed up and arrested two people, and when people in the crowd got angry, Olsten got angry and maced everyone. But, hey, Clark was just following the unofficial, but hugely influential legal principle of, “He’s a cop, and you aren’t.” MADNESS, SQUARED: On May 26, Imo’s Pizza went too far. On that dark day, Imo’s asked its Twitter followers, “Which squares go first? The outside or the inside?” As if that wasn’t enough, the post included a cursed photo of the famously square pizza wherein only the middle pieces were removed — an abandonment

of crust and corner pieces which, under the Geneva Pizza and Stromboli Conventions of 1905, is a war crime. “I have called the police,” one Twitter user commented, while another wondered, “Why did Imo’s choose violence today?” — but there is no answer. Of course an Imo’s pizza is eaten from the outside in. We know this. Children know this. It should go without saying — you don’t see Ford tweeting a picture of an engine and asking, “Which piece goes first?” because whoever is running Ford’s social media hasn’t lost their entire mind. Instead, Imo’s has turned Twitter into a horror show: They’ve taken something beautiful and turned it into a square beyond comprehension, an Eldritch creation, a hollowed-out ghost of what a pizza is supposed to look like. Not even Chicago would do this. Imo’s, you owe everyone an apology. DRIVE-THRU TRASH: There are already too many examples of terrible customer behavior toward fast-food workers, but the situation that’s ensnared a Popeye’s in Lake Saint Louis goes beyond run-of-themill “customer is always right” shittitude and straight to the tremendously dumb and intentionally cruel: On May 26, someone duct-taped a sign to the store’s drivethru menu, warning that, “Effective 6-1-21 this restaurant is under new management and will reserve the right to refuse service to white people. We apologize for any inconvenience.” But the Popeye’s was not behind the sign, and no such policy was being enforced, say local police, who add they are investigating “a trespassing and possibly a related vandalism case” and searching for the perpetrators behind the fabricated discrimination. While the police attempted to shut down the rumor mill, it didn’t stop thousands online from sharing the pics and calling for boycotts or other harassment of the store. It proves once again that a lie is much faster than truth — though, hopefully, the truth catches up with the jerks behind this one. A COWARD TO THE END: Any notion that Roy Blunt might find his spine on his way out the door was decisively dashed this week when Missouri’s outgoing senior senator responded to a vote on whether to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capital by opting to just.... not show up. It’s consistent with his established pattern of behavior in the Trump era — release a fence-straddling statement suggesting what happened is Bad, then do literally nothing at all — but the sheer cowardice of it all is beyond tiring. If he’s not willing to do the sensible thing, couldn’t he at least do the absurd one? Some ideological consistency would be nice, is all. n

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THE

F A T A L T U N N E L 14

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In the city with the highest rate of police killings, open investigations pile up while the family of Cortez Bufford waits for answers B Y

A L I S O N

F L O W E R S

“They got him in the darkness.”

S A M

S T E C K L O W

by the city, it had been hanging on two years after being hit with a public nuisance notice for its high number of 911 calls, more than calls for service in the last five years alone. Just two nights before Bufford’s death, a 14-year-old boy had been shot there multiple times during an argument. When danger came, Bufford was standing behind the store, perhaps to smoke a cigarette away from flammables. He wouldn’t have wanted to stink up his friend’s nice rental car, his mother Tammy Bufford speculated. Or maybe he was taking a leak, as reports suggest, though no evidence of public urination was found. “Hey man, stop pissing in public,” said a man in a white Chevy Tahoe. He was riding with another man. They pulled up alongside Bufford, according to reports. “Put your junk away.” Bufford grinned and adjusted his gray sweatpants, but when one of the men opened the door of the Tahoe to approach him, his eyes widened and fear spread across his face, according to a video statement by one of the men. That’s when ufford fled. Within seconds, the man chasing him pulled out a gun, video outside the gas station shows. Bufford, running for his life, col-

lided at one point with the Tahoe driven by the other man. Bufford fell to the ground. “They hit him with the truck. He got up and kept running,” Phillips said. Bufford ran in between two homes on Bates but couldn’t clear the fence. He scu ed with the man who was after him, scratching him in the process, and broke free again. He ran across the street into another gangway until, unable to jump the fence, he couldn’t run anymore. “ heard the first shot. t was a pause,” Phillips said in an interview. “Then after that, it was like Boom! Pause. Then it was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom ... they just killed him.” The medical examiner who performed Bufford’s autopsy ruled the manner of his death a homicide. That’s what forensic pathologists write, as a matter of course, when one human being dies at the hands of another human being. That part is no mystery. Bufford’s shooter has always been known to police. Because he is the police. Or, as reports refer to him, fficer . In those reports, Bufford is “the suspect,” and what began as a “pedestrian check” swiftly turned deadly. Two people, a white police officer and a lac man, each carrying a strong internal narrative

The gangway between 533 and 535 Bates Avenue. | ALISON FLOWERS/INVISIBLE INSTITUE

Continued on pg 16

This is the poetry of trauma parents like Antoine and Tammy Bufford have learned to speak. They are describing how their son was gunned down in the narrow gangway between a red-brick cottage and a weathered farmhouse in the Carondelet neighborhood of St. Louis on December 12, 2019. “He waited until Cortez got in the darkness,” Antoine Bufford said. “You couldn’t see nothing there. Nothing.” The 4-foot-9-inch space between 535 and 533 Bates Avenue is remarkably dark. Like a black hole, or a tunnel with no light at the end of it, the narrow grassy space runs about 32 feet before it dead-ends into a wood fence. That is where 24-year-old Cortez Bufford, chased by a man with a gun, couldn’t run any farther on that Thursday night around 9:30 p.m. ight shots were fired. ive, possibly six, of them hit Bufford’s body, front and back, from his left fingertip to the right thigh and upper back. Three shots to his face and head, one in each cheek, and the fatal shot to the upper left forehead. “It was like he was target prac-

First published by The Intercept, in partnership with the Invisible Institute. tice,” his father recalled thinking, as he looked over his son’s body at the family’s funeral home to “see everything that they had did to him.” Wearing a yellow Missouri Tigers T-shirt, Bufford had been out that night with a good friend from his neighborhood, Terell Phillips. “Just a regular day,” Phillips said. “We was just chilling.” In the course of the evening, they stopped at a BP gas station in the rental car his friend was driving for gas, a juice drink and cigarettes. The BP sits across the street from a vacant lot, close to the Mississippi River, right by a highway overpass. Threatened with closure

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THE FATAL TUNNEL Continued from pg 15

about the other, are both reportedly, and legally, carrying guns. They both carry something else, too: trauma. In the blackness of the gangway, their fears collide. As space and focus narrow, it is hard to discern who, e actly, is in control of their actions anymore and who is captive of a neurological train of events with lethal momentum — an incident mired in political and sociological implications, where perspective dictates who plays the roles of the victim and the offender. Law enforcement officers li e fficer are taught to preempt. To shoot first. To ma e it out alive in a society flooded with guns. n the close space between the two houses, there was no cover for either of them. “They call it the old fatal tunnel, basically, fficer said in a video interview with force investigators about a month after the shooting. He fidgeted his fingers, as though uncomfortable about what he had ust said. perts in close quarter combat often refer to such situations as the “fatal funnel.” What happened in the gangway was also a kind of perceptual tunnel. Despite the implausibility of fficer ’s ability to see within this space, his “tunnel vision” certainly took over, distorting reality by making him believe that Bufford was shooting at him, he would later claim. And within our current mode of aggressive policing, this space between perception and reality can produce, and will continue to produce, tragic, absurd — and avoidable — outcomes. “How do you fear for your life if he’s running away from you?” Tammy Bufford, Cortez’s mother, asks. “At what point was there a threat? At what point was there a threat?”

Your Son Was Murdered

For a year and a half, the Bufford case has been suspended in the purgatory of unresolved police shooting cases. No charges filed. No determination made. Left in darkness, in a city with the highest rate of police killings in the country. “That police officer needs to go to jail,” said Tammy Bufford. “You took an oath to protect and serve the community. You did not take an oath to be udge, ury and e ecutioner.” Many fatal police shooting in-

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The BP gas station on Bates Avenue, seen on May 17. | MICHAEL B. THOMAS FOR THE INTERCEPT vestigations around the country can take years to conclude, but the Bufford case is joined by more than twenty others in St. Louis — including seven in alone, ufford’s among them — that have yet to receive a determination on filing criminal charges from Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner or, as the Riverfront Times and The Trace reported earlier this year, a review of any kind from the Civilian Oversight Board. This inaction comes nearly seven years after a system was established to probe these cases, following the killings of Michael Brown by nearby Ferguson police and Kajieme Powell and VonDerritt Myers Jr. by St. Louis police. A byproduct of this flurry of reforms is a convoluted process, in which added layers of review can leave a case to crumble in the pipeline of investigations. In 2014, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department created the Force Investigation Unit, or FIU, tasked with focusing solely on criminal investigations of police shootings. (Previously, there was just a review by Internal Affairs for policy violations.) Shortly thereafter, the Circuit Attorney’s ffice entered into an agreement with the police department to review these investigations for criminal charges. After a ruling, the cases are supposed to head back to Internal Affairs and another internal board for policy and training review and, finally, to the police chief. Then, and only then, can the

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Civilian Oversight Board, established as the third prong of review for police shootings in 2015, receive the investigation. This stands in contrast to how police shootings are investigated in many other large cities, as well as best practices from organizations li e the olice ecutive Research Forum, which recommends that the administrative and criminal reviews of shootings happen simultaneously. “If you ask one entity, they’ll say it’s the other entity,” said Civilian Oversight Board Commissioner Kimberley Taylor-Riley, who reports that she has yet to receive a single police shooting case, not even shootings that are unquestionably closed. This bureaucratic limbo is compounded by the fact that the Deadly Force Review Board, which reviews cases before they go to the oversight board, has not been convened in over two years. A new report released by Taylor-Riley this month points to Gardner’s office as the bottlenec . Since ta ing office in , Gardner has charged officers in at least three shootings: a nonfatal case from in which an officer shot an unarmed carjacking suspect in the back, a nonfatal 2019 case in which off duty officers got into an altercation with a man at a bar, and another 2019 shooting in which an officer illed another officer in a game of ussian roulette. “I don’t believe police can investigate themselves, and I have

prosecuted police officers during my tenure and will hold them accountable just like anyone else,” Gardner said while campaigning for reelection in 2020. Otherwise put, as she told the Missouri Independent and Reveal, she cannot rely on investigations conducted by an officer’s “friends. Yet Gardner’s reluctance to make determinations in cases brings the investigative process to a standstill. Most cases remain indefinitely open when charges are not brought against an officer. This results in a backlog of cases. Despite there being an attorney and investigator within Gardner’s office to review these cases, there is no timeline to conclude them. In a post-George Floyd reality (Bufford’s police killing preceded loyd’s by five months , St. Louis elected Mayor Tishaura Jones, a progressive figure who quic ly issued an e ecutive order directing the SLMPD to share years of Internal Affairs data and other records with the oversight board. But ensuring civilian review of fatal police shootings, which activists have been calling for since the 1980s, may not be so simple. New legislation to streamline the review process would need to be passed by the Board of Aldermen. Despite a swing to the left, the board is still led by Lewis Reed, who has been criticized for proposing “stunt” police reforms that have done little to enact structural change. (Recently released records show that Gardner is facing

state Supreme Court disciplinary proceedings for her handling of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens’ criminal investigation.) And so the vast majority of these cases, like Bufford’s, remain in the dark, unable to move forward. “We look at the news, and it’s constantly still happening to young Black kids and brown kids,” said Antoine Bufford, who protests with family members in marches for Black lives. “It’s just not going to stop.” With the city silent on the Bufford case, police investigators have not reached out to the family with updates. Not since they were first called in. That’s when they sat across from Lt. John Green, the commander of the FIU, a veteran homicide investigator. They remember the lieutenant telling them something rather peculiar for someone in his position, something that would constitute a rupture in the code of silence: Your son was murdered. “I don’t know if he would agree with it again, but he said it,” Antoine Bufford insisted in an interview for this story last December, on the anniversary of his son’s death. Tammy Bufford, who was present during the police meeting, heard the same thing. In fact, today, Green does not agree with it. He denies making the utterance at all: “I didn’t say that their son was murdered. I said he was killed. I said he was shot. … No, I don’t know where they got that from.” Green declined to address any specific questions about the ufford case, deferring to Gardner: “It’s her shop. She can do whatever she wants to do. … We’re not going to surpass her. That’s not good business.” But, Green mentioned, he has inquired about the status of the Bufford case since delivering his findings to Gardner’s office. “We’ve asked several times,” he said. “The ball is in her court. I can’t push her to do anything. She doesn’t work for the police department. She’s an elected official. We just have to wait.”

Baby Child

The youngest in a tight-knit family, Cortez Bufford spent all 24 years of his life in south St. Louis, where he loved playing basketball in the backyard. They had a full court. He was still living at home when he died. “This is our baby child,” Antoine Bufford said of his son. “Can’t get rid of that last one.” Cortez always loved fast cars.

St. Louis Police Officer Lucas Roethlisberger | ST. LOUIS METROPOLITAN POLICE

“I don’t think he knew how to drive slow,” said Monisha Merrill, his sister. His last car was a 1994 Firebird, which Antoine is trying to fi . A “dork” with glasses who got teased in grade school, Cortez too his first ob — apart from his neighborhood lemonade and hot dog stand operation — as a dishwasher at the Old Spaghetti Factory. He loved working there, his parents remember, and was upset with them when he had to quit to take a big family vacation to New Orleans. Photo ops with alligators during a swamp tour cheered him up, but it was a sore spot for years. He would eat ice cream and watch movies with his nieces and nephews and housesit for his sister, Ericka Freeman, who described him as her sidekick who “always went for what was right.” Cortez later took warehouse obs at ed and S, earning employee accolades for his forklift operation skills. But he lost his job of several years after failing a drug test for smoking weed, his father said. One of his last jobs was working at Henry’s Funeral and Cremation Service, a business his cousin Brandon opened in late 2017. It was there that his parents would view his body for the first time and his homegoing service would be held. The Buffords, like many Black families, had “the talk” with Corte when he was young — the one about the police, what his rights were, and the potential dangers ahead. He didn’t have any trouble with law enforcement until April 2014, four months before Michael Brown’s police killing in Ferguson. Driving the speed limit, and after making a legal U-turn, Buf-

ford was pulled over. ne officer demanded that he get out of the car. After Bufford protested and asked why he was being detained, two officers pulled him out of the car using an “armbar technique, a painful attack on the elbow oint. ventually nine officers came to the scene. The encounter received national attention due to a viral dashcam video of his beating and arrest. The video shows two of the officers ic ing, stomping and tasing Bufford as he screams. Then, almost two minutes into the beating, an officer says, “Hold up, hold up y’all, hold up, hold up. Everybody hold up. We’re red right now, so if you guys are worried about cameras, just wait,” before shutting off the video. nly after the officers subdued him did they realize that Cortez had a gun. He wasn’t old enough to be carrying it. He was arrested and charged, but after the public fallout, the case was dropped. The Buffords were in Chicago visiting family when they got the call that their son was hurt. When they returned to St. Louis, he was in bad shape. They observed gashes across his head and taser marks on his body. They took Cortez back to the doctor to get his hand recast. Physically, he survived, but “mentally, he was crushed,” Tammy Bufford said. n , ufford filed a lawsuit against several officers, earning a $20,000 settlement. He had won, but, the family remembers, his lawyer warned him that he would be a target in the future. In the four years that followed, Bufford was pulled over, stopped while walking and harassed, his parents say. While there are no publicly accessible records or complaints documenting these events, there are reports of two arrests, one in 2017 for apparently not leaving a MetroLink station when asked and “pulling his arms back” (resisting arrest, trespassing and marijuana possession), and one about three weeks before his death. In that case, police reported that Bufford was driving a stolen car, an allegation not supported by the charges. When they tried to apprehend him, “the defendant began to flee on foot, court records show. The officers caught up with him and made the arrest, putting a felony drug charge on his record.

Quite Rational Fear

Dr. C.C. Cassell, a licensed clinical psychologist in California who specializes in trauma, has worked e tensively with survivors of com-

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munity violence, se ual violence and combat veterans who have e perienced war related trauma. Cassell is acquainted with the Bufford family, though she never knew Cortez. In 2020, she helped the uffords file a sunshine law request with the SLM . Then she brought the case to the Invisible Institute and The Intercept for further investigation. Cassell recalls how the hypervigilance of her veteran patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often manifests itself by carrying guns. Not one gun, but multiple guns hidden throughout their homes, with at least one on their person at all times. “Having these weapons made them feel safe,” Cassell remembers. “They felt naked without them. For me, the surprising part was how familiar this behavior was.” It reminded her of the Black men she knew, who did not carry weapons with an intent or desire to harm anyone, but simply because they never felt safe anywhere: “Even in their own homes. … Having a weapon was the only way they could regain a sense of safety, albeit a fragile one.” Undoubtedly, Bufford was a trauma survivor. According to Cassell, the way he reportedly turned away from the police vehicle when he first saw it, which fficer later described as “ ind of suspicious — that action alone, from a psychological standpoint, foregrounds his desire to avoid police interaction. Phillips had seen Bufford’s fear of the police play out before. “Every time he seen them, I mean, like, every time he seen them, he just wanted to get away.” Cassell says ufford’s flight from police is “quite possibly a survival instinct driven by quite rational fear.” This leaves her to wonder: “What protections do we as U.S. citizens have when the very individuals who are employed to protect us pose a threat to our lives?” uilding on her deep e perience working with trauma survivors, Cassell now focuses on helping people of color cope with race-related trauma. “The concept of PTSD is meant to capture the aftereffects of trauma, hence the name ‘post’traumatic stress disorder,” Cassell notes. “However, Black people in this country are facing continuous traumatic stress.” oth ufford and hillips e perienced such trauma. For Phillips, disturbingly, Bufford isn’t the first friend of his who has died

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from police gunfire after running down a St. Louis gangway: “ hen it’s constantly happening, ’m not going to say you get immune to it, but you don’t go through what you would go through if this was your first childhood friend. Cassell says it is “a sad reality” that lac men are often not given the opportunity to learn how to understand their ongoing trauma, “despite how pervasive this problem is.” n ufford’s case, Cassell could not diagnose him, but she does have a deep nowledge of his history and is struc by a pattern: He had no record of violence. Even during his previously documented police encounters, including one in which he was severely inured, he never attempted to use a weapon. Also, notably, during his struggle to escape fficer in the first gangway, when the officer pointed his gun at him “to protect myself,” ufford did not pull the weapon then either, according to reports. “ hat he wanted to do was get away, said hillips, who has his own problematic history with law enforcement, from a resisting arrest charge to drug and weapon convictions. Phillips insists that ufford would not have pulled a gun on an officer: “He wanted to go home.”

nown as the ump out squad, said activist ohn Chasnoff, who has wor ed on policing issues in St. Louis for more than two decades. “There’s been many complaints over the years of them suddenly descending on people, harassing people, holding guns to their head and other heavy-handed tactics.” The fact that the unit has for decades also functioned as the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s S AT team — for which they receive highly militari ed training — is, “structurally, a big mista e, Chasnoff said. An analysis by his group, the Coalition Against olice Crimes epression, found that in at least eight shootings between and , the officers involved were either current or future members of the M and S AT teams. The mobile officers are not assigned to a district. They can go anywhere in the city, a style of hot spot policing that appears to have changed little over the years. A review by a ris assessment firm published last ecember found that the SLM lac s a coordinated crime plan, as the targeting of crime hot spots results in officers flooding already over policed and under resourced neighborhoods. perating li e a blunt tool on violent crime, SLM ’s “bro en windows style policing within the M creates “significant blind spots, according to the ris assessment report.

Cowboys

It Was Very Dark

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fficer and his partner that night, fficer , were part of the Mobile eserve nit, a crew of roving tactical officers that responds to hot spots. “Loo ing for trouble, as one news article described it. The unit has been around for more than years. hen M debuted in , a writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described it as “the new shoc unit troop organi ed to bac up district officers in the ceaseless war against crime. eports from its early years suggest a history of unconstitutional practices: In its first five months of e istence, M officers questioned more than , people, the Associated Press reported. Over the years, the unit has wor ed alongside the SWAT team. “They’re sort of the cowboys of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police epartment, said ich McNelley, a former public defender whose cases at times involved M officers in the early s. The M has “historically been

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hen mobile officers roamed the area near the BP the night Bufford was illed, several of their in car video cameras were rolling. or fficer and fficer , their car video was never pulled. nvestigative reports do not say whether it ever existed. The only police shooting video saved on ecember , , came from a different part of the city earlier in the day where a white man was robbing a hite Castle. He pointed a gun at officers before running away, the video shows. olice then shot the man. n the nee. He survived. n ufford’s case, investigators retrieved scraps of dispatch tape that depict the illing and its aftermath. The audio quic ly escalates into chaos, after the police citi en encounter has already turned into a pursuit. ithin about a minute: “Got shots fired Shots fired, shots fired The dispatcher as s if it’s the officer or suspect who is down. “ e need MS urgent an offi-

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Monisha Merrill, sister of Cortez Bufford, poses for a portrait at the Bufford home. | MICHAEL B. THOMAS FOR THE INTERCEPT

Childhood family photos of Cortez Bufford. | MICHAEL B. THOMAS FOR THE INTERCEPT cer says. “ or an officer or suspect? “ or the suspect. The officer’s OK,” one of them says. “EMS is responding. District ne’s en route. Are all mobile officers accounted for? “ verybody is . “That’s good, the dispatcher responds. ut what happened in the gangway, in between these frantic dispatches, only fficer survived to say. hile there are no nown eyewitnesses, there are earwitness accounts from people in nearby homes and businesses. Their accounts of the verbal commands they heard fficer give differ. here they align, however, is that at no point did fficer identify himself as a police officer, tell ufford he was under arrest or

tell him that he had committed a crime. ven if there had been eyewitnesses, the gangway was too dar to see anything, according to fficer . “How was the lighting in the gangway? police investigators as ed. “ t was very dar , fficer said in a video interview. “ id you have to use your flashlight to see down? “Yes, I did.” “ hen you first got to the gangway, did you have your flashlight on? “No, I did not.” “How far could you see? “ could not see in the gangway, fficer said. “ t was very dar . The investigators as ed fficer the same. “ t was dar bac there, Green,

Tammy Bufford and Antoine Bufford pose for a portrait at their home. | MICHAEL B. THOMAS FOR THE INTERCEPT the lieutenant, said. “Did you have any light or anything?” “No, I did not have a chance to retrieve my flashlight ... because the fact that he had a firearm was more important for me to have control with both my hands free, fficer answered. Later in the interview, another investigator returned to the point. “ noticed it was pretty dar , he said. “How was your vision in that?” fficer , along with his attorney, seemed to register the point of emphasis. “I could see,” he said, nodding. “I could see.” The FIU report documents the lighting conditions as being “during the hours of dar ness yet notes that “commercial grade streetlamps were on at the time of the shooting. The report also mentions the existence of a neighbor’s doorbell camera that captured video of the gangway ust after the shooting for several minutes. The video was turned over to the Circuit Attorney’s ffice, according to the FIU investigation. The footage is reportedly not “very good quality, which itself

might testify to the poor lighting conditions. In response to records requests, the SLM said it didn’t have a copy of the video, and the Circuit Attorney’s ffice denied the request, saying it is still investigating the case. hatever fficer claims to have seen in the dar ness, including ufford loo ing at him “eye to eye, what he says he thought happened in the gangway did not, in fact, occur. He remembers ufford shooting at him. He didn’t. “To my mind, I thought he did shoot at me, fficer told investigators. “In my mind, I thought he was shooting at me too. The sequence of it was weird, he said: “ remember pop pop pause pop pop. t wasn’t a smooth pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.” Then, he reiterated: “ do, believe that he was shooting at me. “ o you thin he fired first, or did you fire first? the investigator as ed. “ thin we were both about the same time, fficer chuc led. ufford’s si gunshot wounds, front and bac , tell their own story, though it is nearly impossible to

determine the sequence of shots. “Most of the time you can’t reliably order the sequence of the gunshot wounds based on medical evidence,” said Dr. James il ins, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy in this case. With respect to the question of whether ufford was facing or had his bac to the officer, based on the medical evidence, according to il ins, “either scenario is possible. The first gunshot identified in the medical e aminer’s report was the fatal one to the head. Some of the other wounds, the one in the right thigh and the two in his face, are consistent with fficer ’s account. ut it’s the gunshot to ufford’s bac that complicates his story. Based on the resting position of ufford’s body — according to interviews and handwritten renderings of the scene, he was on his stomach, meaning that he would have fallen forward — a shot to the bac complicates fficer ’s statement that ufford was facing him when he fired his police weapon at him. Another complication to fficer ’s narrative is the shell casings from his gun. hile fficer reports shooting from the mouth of the gangway, many of the casings were found toward the middle of the pathway, indicating that he may have been closer than he claimed.

Manbag

hen fficer attempted to stop ufford behind the gas station, he noticed his “manbag under his ac et. “That right there ind of indicated in my mind that he might be carrying something, fficer said. ideo shows that fficer pulled out his gun and pointed it at ufford, after ufford too off running. But he told investigators that he didn’t pull his gun out until after he saw ufford’s weapon, an account contradicted by the footage. When Bufford and the Tahoe collided, on the front right passenger side of the vehicle, both fficer and fficer say in their video interviews, they first saw an e tended maga ine of a gun protruding from ufford’s shoulder bag. The two officers were only officially interviewed about a month after the incident, allowing ample opportunity to collect themselves, as well as potentially align and inoculate their accounts from criminal implications. And, due to 5h Amendment protections, officers cannot be compelled to ma e any

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statements in the criminal investigation, or else their testimony is off-limits in court. In cities such as hiladelphia and hoeni , however, officers have to give statements in an administrative investigation within hours of a shooting to determine if it was within policy, which happens alongside the criminal investigation. But not in St. Louis: “Whenever he’s ready to be interviewed, that’s when can interview him, Green said. “There’s nothing you can do about that. have to wait until he ma es a statement. fficer ’s statement is nearly identical to fficer ’s account, but it is doubtful that he could have seen ufford’s gun, on the opposite side of the Tahoe from the driver’s seat, when it — if it — became visible from his bag when he fell to the ground. Video from inside the BP station, which reportedly shows ufford ma ing a purchase, does not indicate that a gun was visible at any point. Also, two other officers who pulled up as ufford ran away and collided with the vehicle did not say they saw a gun in statements made to investigators less than hours later. After the shooting, fficer approached the gangway and rolled ufford over, allegedly finding a gun underneath his torso, according to his interview. fficer either threw or ic ed it out of the way, he can’t remember. The crime scene evaluation does not indicate how ufford’s arms were lying when he hit the ground. t is not documented whether the satchel was already opened or if investigators had to un ip it themselves. t is also un nown whether ufford was holding the gun as he fell, if he dropped the gun, or if the gun was still in his shoulder bag when he was shot. hotos show a grisly scene, with une plained blood smears on ufford’s bo of cigarettes, the reported gun he was carrying, and ambiguous blood impressions on fficer ’s police uniform shirt and shoe. Prescription drugs appear sprin led about the ground. According to il ins, the forensic pathologist who reviewed ufford’s autopsy for this story, ufford had a “therapeutic level” of prescription Tylenol and codeine in his system, as well as mari uana, but “not a significantly high level.” The detail that Bufford had a gun beneath him, however, corroborated by another responding officer, cements ufford as a suspect in the police version of events, the “guy with a gun, the

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“bad guy,” described in dispatch audio. Woven into the tight choreography of codes and signals, this narrative begins to take shape. That Bufford was a “bad guy” is certainly the impression police left with lifelong Bates Avenue resident andy rater, former owner of the Tin Cup bar across the street from the incident. rater is listed as a witness, though he didn’t see or hear anything take place. In an interview for this story, rater said he heard that ufford was “robbing a place.” But when someone’s body has been riddled with bullets, it can be hard not to recognize their victimhood. The communications supervisor almost slipped up on the police radio herself: “If you guys didn’t hear, the victim — er, oh, not a victim — suspect is remaining on the scene,” she said. Later, when olice Commissioner John Hayden came to the scene, where the TV news had set up, he sidestepped the Buffords, who were pleading to see their son, they say. Hayden wouldn’t stop to talk to them. “The officer fired, Hayden told reporters, and the people of St. Louis, on the news that night. “The officer’s not sure whether or not the suspect fired. By the time paramedics took Bufford’s body away, the winter grass was soaked with blood.

You Could Have Killed Me

fficer has a name: Lucas oethlisberger. He is in his mid-30s, married with kids, originally from Nashville. A strong runner, Roethlisberger was a cross-country and track standout in high school and college, and he is a Saint Louis University alum. A thirteen-year veteran of the SLM force, he holds the department’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor, and colleagues picked him as their fficer of the Year in . “We have a great department,” Roethlisberger told the St. Louis o affiliate in . “Leadership, integrity … you live with it right in your chest, where your badge is.” Roethlisberger earned these distinctions only a few years into his career after nearly dying from an on-duty shooting. A bullet ripped through the carotid artery in his neck. He was in a coma, had two strokes, and went through nine months of rehabilitation. “He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t write, couldn’t

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feed himself,” his wife Courtney told the T news. or wee s, she slept by his side on a cot in his hospital room. n , oethlisberger and a partner stopped a car for traveling with its headlights off. When Roethlisberger tried to search Kim Cobb, a Black driver, he pulled a gun on the officers, shooting oethlisberger in the nec . He fired again, hitting Roethlisberger’s bullet-resistant vest and his right arm. Roethlisberger’s partner was hit in the leg and returned fire, shooting Cobb in the back. Cobb had no record, other than a marijuana possession arrest, and he was under the influence of marijuana the night he shot the officers, his attorney said. oth officers survived. Cobb pleaded guilty to the assaults. His attorney proposed a sentence of eighteen years. Cobb got four life sentences instead. Circuit Court Judge Dennis Schaumann, in explaining his decision to the court, had his own theory for why Cobb shot his gun. “The officers were wearing blue, and no other reason,” Schaumann said. “This is happening too much in society. It’s got to stop.” During his victim impact statement, a “palpably angry” Roethlisberger spoke with “clipped words,” a journalist reported. “You are a coward, oethlisberger told Cobb. “I have kids, for God’s sa es. You could have illed me.” Schaumann had more to say, scolding Cobb: “ n this life, Mr. Cobb, we all have to make choices, and you made a horrible choice, first of all, by carrying a gun and second of all, for using it.” Staring down Cobb, Courtney Roethlisberger asked him: “Was it worth it?” After the hearing, Roethlisberger told reporters: “We got justice.”

On A Mission

In the years since Cobb’s sentencing, Roethlisberger has stayed out of the news, despite shooting at another Black man on St. Louis’s north side. A separate investigation from anuary indicates that oethlisberger fired at — and missed — Tremayne Silas after he allegedly pointed an assault rifle at him, according to Roethlisberger. After Silas fled his car during an attempted traffic stop, admittedly carrying a gun, Roethlisberger alone chased him on foot as other officers chased the car’s passenger and tried to cut Silas off. Roethlisberger told investigators that Silas pointed the gun at him before

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jumping a backyard fence. In an interview with investigators, Silas denied ever pointing his gun at officers and said that officers tased and “kicked the shit out of” him after he had surrendered. Civilian video footage obtained by investigators, which captured only part of the incident, shows Silas running away from Roethlisberger. The incident, which also took place at night in a residential area, was never publicly reported. Even after Roethlisberger killed Bufford almost two years later, local reporters didn’t pick up on the fact that he was the shooter. His name appears in public records about the case, but he wasn’t otherwise identified as ufford’s iller. His public-facing reputation still intact, Roethlisberger’s interactions with Black citizens have remained fraught. He is one of officers named in an ongoing federal lawsuit for “kettling” — a controversial law enforcement tactic that prevents people from dispersing — during the protests that followed SLM officer Jason Stockley’s acquittal for the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, a Black man. Roethlisberger has also received two citizen complaints that the department released. The first came from Colette Taylor Moore in , who said oethlisberger called her teenage son off her mother’s front porch, harassing and threatening him with tasing if he didn’t come to him. “He was just on a mission,” Taylor Moore remembers. “He had a chip on his shoulder, an arrogance, li e, You can’t tell me anything.’ He was brash, if you will. I would have understood his attitude more if he were being taunted or disrespected, but there was no need for any of that.” The SLM would not release the outcome of Taylor Moore’s complaint, but she reports that nothing happened in the case, except a call from someone who sounded high-ranking and explained that Roethlisberger had been investigating a disturbance on the block. “That was not the truth,” TaylorMoore said. “There was no one else there.” n the complaint, Taylor Moore says that Roethlisberger also harassed three other young men walking down that block, as her son later observed. In a second citizen complaint filed by La ictor allace in , Roethlisberger was one of several officers accused of ripping out dreadlocks from the man’s head, after kicking in his girlfriend’s

front door and forcing him to dress in her clothing. “I was called a ‘bitch,’ so they said they’re going to dress me like one and gave me my girlfriend clothes,” Wallace wrote in the complaint. “I was beat and charged with a gun and drugs and they knew that I was innocent.” The criminal charges stemming from Wallace’s arrest did not hold up in court. His complaint against Roethlisberger was withdrawn pending resolution of his criminal case, according to Civilian Oversight Board records. It does not appear that it was refiled. oethlisberger did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Wallace did not respond to requests for comment.

Cream of Wheat

The morning before Bufford died, his dad made him breakfast. Oatmeal, turkey sausage, cream of wheat, toast. “ ’m up every morning fi ing him breakfast,” Antoine Bufford says, speaking in the present tense, as though Cortez is still there beside him. “That’s what I do every morning for him, seven days a week, make sure he has his breakfast.” They ate together. Antoine Bufford was leaving that day to visit Cortez’s brother in Texas. He tried one last time to get his son to come with him, to leave town. “You should go, he pushed. A fresh start, he said. It’s not safe here, he warned. “I’ve just got some things I need to do,” Cortez told him. His son didn’t want to leave home. But when Antoine gets to thinking about it, he feels that he should have made him leave. “You’re his father, he tells himself. “Don’t let him make those kinds of decisions, even though he’s grown.” But Cortez didn’t want to be forced out. He would try to reason with his parents. “Why do I have to uproot my life?” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Just Put Him in Handcuffs

“ lease stop L AS stop That’s what Roethlisberger said he remembers shouting as he chased Bufford into the gangway. Bufford turned around and faced him, Roethlisberger told investigators. “At that time, I’m making a quick reaction in my mind that I need a backup. I need the backup. And then before I know it, that I’m backing up, I see him pulling the firearm from the bag and then turning over towards me and then at — ” Roethlisberger’s voice

cracks with emotion in his police video interview. He tries to start again: “And then at that time — ” Another voice crack. Roethlisberger sits in silence with investigators for more than 30 seconds as he tries to regain his composure. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then another fifteen seconds or so pass before he resumes. “So, I know he’s pointing the gun at me. The first thing, pull out my gun. I’m left-handed, grab hold of the gun. I run. I’m aiming with my sights, and I’m backing up, and I said, ‘Drop the gun! Drop the gun!’ as loud as I could. And then, fearing for my life, shot a round, and I’m just backin’ up, shooting, backing up, backing up, because there was no cover at all.” The fatal tunnel. Roethlisberger backed up all the way to the corner of one of the Bates houses, but he still had his gun pointing at Bufford when he saw his partner in the Tahoe pull up. He kept holding down the position “because he could start shooting at us,” Roethlisberger said. fficer — his name is Martinous alls — was the first to come to the gangway. ther officers soon followed. He had originally tried to cut off Bufford’s path by driving close to the other side of the wood fence. After hearing the shots fired, he looped bac around to Bates. “Luke, where are you?” Walls called into the darkness from the Tahoe. “I’m over here,” Roethlisberger said. When Walls hopped out and walked the length of the gangway, all the way to the end, he found Bufford’s lifeless body. He could tell he wasn’t breathing and figured there wasn’t anything he could do to render aid other than call MS, alls later told investigators in a video interview. Walls did not respond to requests for comment. Two other responding officers showed up to the gangway. “What should I do?” Walls asked. “Just put him in handcuffs,” one of the officers said. Roethlisberger offered to do it himself: “If you’re going to put handcuffs on him, then I’m going to put handcuffs on him.” “No, no, no, the officer told him, pushing him away, according to Roethlisberger’s video interview. “Back up.” Shortly after his lieutenant came to the scene, Roethlisberger retreated to the Tahoe. Then, when MS arrived, he was shepherded

to the ambulance so the paramedics could take his vitals. To make sure he was OK, Roethlisberger remembers. He took off his duty belt and uniform shirt. And his bulletproof vest. While paramedics evaluated him, his lawyer had quickly arrived to counsel him, beating force investigators to the scene. Then he had to go back to police headquarters to take a drug test and breathalyzer, before being relieved of his duties, Roethlisberger says. “I went back home,” he concluded his statement. It was time to take the investigators’ questions. “When he pulled out the gun, was that something you were expecting?” Roethlisberger told them he was hoping it wasn’t going to happen like that, but the situation was getting serious. Worse and worse, he said, and Bufford just wouldn’t give up. In response to a request for comment, the SLM emailed the following statement: “As to your request regarding the case involving the two officers mentioned, the department does not speak on prior or pending litigation.”

Trigger Point

“We all carry out our prejudices,” said Alexa James, a police trauma specialist and CEO of Chicago’s chapter of the National Alliance for Mental llness. “ ear is protective in many ways. It keeps us from things that have harmed us historically. But fear also reduces our opportunities to grow and expand and be uncomfortable.” ames has served on the olice Accountability Tas orce in Chicago, created in , in the wa e of the dashcam video release of year old Laquan Mc onald being shot times front and bac by former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was convicted for murder in . n an interview for this story, James spoke in general terms about police mental health issues and trauma, though she did not review the Bufford case specifically. Trauma changes the way we relate to other people. “Every single interaction you have and every experience you have, it colors the way that your lens of the world is. eriod. nd of story. t changes your perspective,” James said. But trauma does not equal traumatized, nor does it lead to violence or reactivity, James explains. Individuals have different capacities for resilience: “We never know the trigger point of somebody, right? What is going to

harm somebody and what is going to build resilience.” Historically, police mental health services have not been well funded, but late in , ames became the new “senior advisor of wellness to the Chicago olice Department, where she had previously provided trainings of officers for more than a decade. She also helped change the department’s policy for its Traumatic ncident Stress Management rogram, where on-duty cops are referred after certain incidents. “That cumulative trauma without any space in between to really debrief and process is not going to allow their brains to operate effectively because they’re in crisis mode,” James said. “They’re in fight or flight. A public safety issue itself, unaddressed trauma in officers is dangerous for both the individuals they engage with and themselves. Moreover, the collective trauma of officers interacts with that of communities they police, or over-police. “When you put two groups of people together that both feel really impacted by not having ownership and power and control, it gets really messy,” James said, noting also the significant equity issues for communities of color. “One group is starting with a deficit. In St. Louis, the police chief and then-mayor put out a joint statement in mid , e pressing support for the hiring of mental and behavioral health specialists to assist their officers. They added that de-escalation training, implicit bias training and racial equity training had been mandatory since at the SLM and that officers are taught to use the least amount of force possible to bring an incident under control while protecting life. The use of deadly force, they wrote, is a last resort. “The reverence of human life is paramount,” the statement reads. “The St. Louis Metropolitan olice Department strives to serve the community by protecting life, preventing crime, and maintaining a peaceful culture through respecting the humanity, dignity and constitutional rights of every person.” To that end, the department mandates that whenever possible, officers must identify themselves as police and state their intention to shoot — neither of which happened in the Bufford case. In his video interview with investigators, Roethlisberger indicated that he had undergone some type of counseling after the shooting, saying that he had spoken to his “shrink” about what

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happened.

You Better Not Shoot Him!

Today, there is one streetlight near the gangway where Bufford was slain, but it only sheds light on the pavement directly below it, not on the space between the two houses on Bates. At night, that space remains inky black and impenetrable to the eye. “Can I see him? Let me identify him. Let me make sure that’s my son,” Tammy Bufford pleaded with officers on the night of ecember , . She tried to cross over the police tape. They kept her away. No one confirmed to the uffords that the man killed by police was indeed Cortez until inadvertently, a day later, a detective called her, seeking information: “Do you have any witnesses?” he asked. “Do you have anything?” “ irst of all, don’t have anything because you haven’t even verified whether or not it’s my son,” she told them. “So, you’re calling me on the phone talking about ‘let me verify some information,’ instead of saying, ‘Is that my son? Can I see him?’” It wasn’t until Lt. John Green stepped in and asked Antoine Bufford to come to the station that police confirmed that Corte was dead. The Buffords weren’t allowed to identify him at the morgue, they say. Instead, they had to wait even longer for the morgue to transport the body to the family funeral home. But Tammy and Antoine Bufford didn’t have to see their son to know what had happened to him. ight after the shooting, hillips came to their door. He told them: “The police just killed Cortez.” Investigators never spoke to him on scene, even though they interviewed other earwitnesses. No one, not the police, not the Circuit Attorney’s ffice, has ever reached out to hillips, he said. When he saw Roethlisberger, gun drawn, chasing a Black man, he didn’t reali e at first that it was Corte . Nonetheless, hillips yelled out to try to stop what was about to happen: “Don’t shoot him!” The last thing he saw was the two men disappearing into the darkness. First published by The Intercept, in partnership with the Invisible Institute, on May 29, 2021. Republished with permission from The Intercept, an award-winning nonprofit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism.

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CAFE

A Legacy Lives On After Heriberta Amescua’s death, her children keep her restaurant dream alive with Tacos La Jefa Written by

CHERYL BAEHR Tacos La Jefa 3301 Meramec Street. Sat. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (Closed Sunday through Friday.)

eriberta Amescua would always laugh when people called the dipping liquid that comes with her quesabirria a sauce. “It’s not sauce; it’s broth,” she’d correct them, sometimes instructing her customers to put some rice, cilantro and onions in the Styrofoam cup that contains the glorious, beefy nectar and drink it like a soothing, savory beverage. It wasn’t just culinary semantics that prompted the correction. She didn’t care that people got the name right so much as she wanted to share her Mexican culture with those who ate her food. It’s what prompted her to start selling birria nearly two decades ago, and it’s what animated her decision to open her birria shop, Tacos La Jefa, this past September. Amescua had always dreamed of opening a restaurant for her birria. Her whole life was food, and it seemed like there was never a moment when she was not in her kitchen cooking up the recipes that had been passed down to her from generations of women in her family. She carried on this tradition, instructing her children and grandchildren — including her especially interested granddaughter, Diana Guzman — on the art of making birria, and allowing them to be by her side as she toiled away both preparing and serving her food to anyone lucky enough to get a taste. Though she didn’t have a brickand-mortar spot until late last year, Amescua amassed quite a following over the eighteen years since she began sharing her gift with the world. At first, she coo ed for Me ican festivals around town, and eventually expanded her operation to regular cookouts in her back-

Expect a glorious mess and don’t wear white: Tacos La Jefa’s birrias tacos include a cup of cooking jus for dipping. | MABEL SUEN yard that she advertised by word of mouth. As more and more people outside of Amescua’s inner circle began to learn about her birria, her reputation grew into the stuff of culinary lore, with people lining up in her backyard and around her house to get a taste of her food. In July 2020, her reputation grew even more thanks to a robust social media presence developed by her tech-savvy family members. Though the COVID-19 pandemic had put a damper on her backyard operation, Amescua continued to cook for people, giving away plates of food to anyone in need. Around that time, she caught the eye of the people behind the Dutchtown food hall and commissary Urban Eats, who asked her to become a part of their facility. For Amescua, it was the chance she’d been waiting for her entire life — finally, her longtime dream of opening a restaurant was coming true. Sadly, her joy would be shortlived. A hearty spirit whose family describes her as a warrior, Amescua had been battling health issues for some time and had been in and out of the hospital about every two months for a year. Still,

she refused to give up on her restaurant, and drew strength from the joy she’d see on people’s faces when they ate her food, even rallying for Tacos La Jefa’s Urban Eats grand opening after having heart surgery only a month prior. For seven months she lived the dream, until her health took a turn for the worse. On April 18, at the young age of 69, Amescua passed away peacefully, expressing one wish to her family: Please keep the restaurant going. As painful as her passing was, Amescua’s family had clarity in their grief. Because her last wish was that they continue Tacos La Jefa and keep her legacy alive, they knew they had to honor her request, no matter how painful it might be. As Guzman recalls, the first day the restaurant reopened after her passing was incredibly difficult, because everything reminded the family of her. Her absence was palpable, but they kept smiling through it because they knew it was what she wanted. Through her birria recipe, Amescua’s family is able to feel a closeness to her, even though she is no longer the one tending to the large pots in the kitchen. For those who

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had the privilege of eating her food, the fact that they are following her every last instruction to execute it just right offers a beautiful continuity and connection to her version of the dish; for those of us who were not so lucky, it offers an intimate glimpse into her family traditions and cultural heritage, which is why she wanted to coo it in the first place. You don’t have to have met her to understand why she was so special. One bite of the luscious, slow-cooked meat, dripping with its own chili-infused juices, makes you understand why she was La Jefa. Though birria has become one of those food trends that non-Hispanic people have “discovered” over the past few years, its tradition stretches too far back in Mexico’s culinary history to recount; Amescua herself was cooking it in St. Louis for nearly twenty years. Yet despite its complicated shot to the top of “best food” roundups, it’s understandable why such an incredible treasure has captured the attention of anyone who has had a taste. The beef (likely chuck or another similar stew meat, but Amescua’s family will not disclose her secrets) is cooked for roughly

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Quesabirrias are a glorious combination of pot roast, quesadilla and French dip. | MABEL SUEN

TACOS LA JEFE Continued from pg 23

ten hours with ancho and guajillo chiles, onions and other spices. The result is the most flavorful pot roast you’ve ever had, served with vibrant red-orange chili-soaked tortillas, chopped white onions, cilantro and hot sauce so that you can make your own tacos — if you can stop yourself from ust palming heaps of the succulent meat into your mouth as you try to stuff it into the tortilla. The birria itself is positively maestic, but the reason Tacos La efa has caught fire is because of its quesabirria, a glorious concoction that’s like a cross between pot roast, a cheese quesadilla and a French dip. Amescua’s birria is placed on an open face cheese topped tortilla and griddled, then folded in half. The taco is then dipped in the birria’s cooking liquid and griddled again so it crisps up this has the effect of marrying the molten cheese encrusted edges with the beefy particles in the liquid. It’s outrageously good, but the pièce de résistance is the cup of the coo ing us that comes alongside the quesabirria. Guests are encouraged to dunk the beefy cheese wonder in the savory broth and enjoy how it soaks into every crevice. This is a uice up to your elbows sort of endeavor, and there’s no way you will avoid getting messy (don’t wear a white silk blouse as foolishly did , but even if you do, you will wear that us as a badge of honor. Tacos La efa serves nothing but the birria tacos and quesabirria. It doesn’t have to. There is nothing

Heriberta Amescua, la jefa original, is always present at the restaurant. | MABEL SUEN more you could want from such a magical place. That Amescua’s family has been able to work through their grief and eep it going so that we can experience it makes dining at Tacos La efa an absolute honor. f you as them, though, they say the honor is theirs. “To us, she was a warrior,” say her kids Carmen, Ricardo, Andrea, Ernesto, Elizabeth, Heriberto, Liliana and Marth. “She showed us to never give up and that it’s never too late to follow your dreams. e will eep her dream alive, and we will live one day at a time. e love you and miss you, mother.”

Tacos La Jefa Birria taco ............................................. $3.50 Large quesabirria ................................ $10.50 Birria plate ............................................... $15 • Carry-out and dine-in

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RIVERFRONT TIMES

SHORT ORDERS

[ S T. L O U I S S TA N D A R D S ]

A Tradition in Chicken Hodak’s is as St. Louis as it gets Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

t’s 9:50 a.m., and Steve Connors hasn’t even finished cutting up his lemons and limes for coc tail garnishes when two customers appear at his bar. ithout loo ing up or saying a word, he grabs their beverages and a couple of menus, nowing that the latter are mere formalities. These regulars — li e most of the regulars who come into his bar at Hoda ’s — are so well versed in the offerings that a menu is almost an insult. esides, the reason they’re there is obvious: They want the chic en. Scenes li e this are common at Hoda ’s, the south St. Louis fried chic en institution that has been serving up breaded birds since . riginally a tavern called Matt and Tony’s located on the corner of th and mmet streets, the outfit was more concerned with serving as a watering hole for factory and brewery wor ers than it was with frying chic en. However, once the eponymous Tony Hoda ’s wife, llen, began bringing in her fried chic en for the staff and patrons to en oy, there was no turning bac . t became the tavern’s signature item, and when the husband and wife decided to buy out their partner and move to their current spot on the corner of Gravois and McNair avenues, it was settled that the new restaurant would have chic en as its focus. Connors hasn’t been there for the entire run, but he has wor ed at Hoda ’s for years. At the time he started, he was out of wor and figured he’d bartend to ma e ends meet until he found, in his words, a “real ob. However, from the moment he wal ed into the place and interviewed with Tony Hoda , he new that he was

RIVERFRONT TIMES

Hodak’s fried chicken has been drawing crowds for nearly sixty years. | ANDY PAULISSEN

Regulars begin lining up as early as 10 a.m. for Hodak’s famous fried chicken. | ANDY PAULISSEN getting into somewhere special. “ hen wal ed in the door the first time, felt home for some reason, Connors says. “ can’t e plain it. thought this was ust going to be a temporary thing and had no idea was going to be here this long. ig changes came to the restaurant not long after Connors signed on. n , ust a month and a half after he started, Charlene and

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alph Hegel bought Hoda ’s from its founders. The husband and wife had been in the restaurant business and were already loo ing for an opportunity to wor together when they learned that the Hoda family was getting ready to retire. t was a perfect confluence of circumstances that allowed them to reali e their dream of running a place together, and they threw themselves fully into

the operation. efore they bought the business, Hoda ’s ust served chic en, fries and coleslaw under their leadership, the restaurant e panded its menu, offering sandwiches, salads and appeti ers. They also gave the place a ma eover, and eventually bought the ad acent beauty shop and truc ing company storefronts so that they could e pand to meet the growing demand for their chic en. The investments paid off. According to Connors, before the Hegels came on board, the restaurant did good business, but nothing li e today. Now — at least pre C — it’s not uncommon to have a line stretched down the entrance hall, out the door and around the building on Saturdays and Sundays. “ e’re ust an institution and a mom and pop place, and thin people li e that, Connors says. “ e have people come in on their way to the hoc ey or baseball games, for graduations and funerals and first communions and retirements. ’ve seen three or four generations of families come through, some at the same time. Connors credits the chic en with pac ing the house. The poultry comes in fresh, never fro en,

and is hand breaded with a secret recipe even he hasn’t been able to get his hands on in his three decades of wor ing at the place. very order comes out piping hot, with steam rising out of each piece when you crac them apart, and he believes the reasonable price point ma es the food accessible to everyone. However, he understood from his very first day wor ing behind the bar that Hoda ’s is about much more than chic en. “ very day, you never now who you’re going to meet and what inds of stories you’re going to hear, Connors says. “ very day feels the same, yet different. The bar is such a friendly atmosphere. f you don’t now the person ne t to you when you get here, you’re going to now them before you

[FOOD NEWS]

Transplant-Based Cuisine CC’s Vegan Spot is moving to south St. Louis in July Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

or Trezel Brown, it’s been a joyful week. Not only is she celebrating the two-year anniversary of her restaurant, CC’s Vegan Spot (231 East Delmar Avenue, Alton, Illinois; 618-4338300); she’s also thrilled to announce that she is moving the plant-based eatery to south St. Louis, with plans to open near the intersection of Loughborough and Macklind avenues in early July. The new CC’s Vegan Spot will replace her original Alton location, which will close at the end of June. Though Brown admits the move is bittersweet, she cannot wait to begin the next chapter of her restaurant. “I wanted to keep the Alton location, but it just didn’t work out,” Brown says. “It’s just best for me to let go so that I can put my whole heart and soul into one location, especially with it being so hard to find employees. It’s bittersweet. I’ll never forget where it all started.” The forthcoming CC’s Vegan Spot will be located in the former Corner Bistro space and will have the same menu her regulars have come to love, with a few

Hodak’s is a St. Louis landmark that’s about much more than the food. | ANDY PAULISSEN

The bar at Hodak’s attracts a lively, welcoming crowd. | ANDY PAULISSEN

minor tweaks. Brown will be taking the Beyond Burgers off the menu and will instead focus on her own eggplant and beet burgers, which have been great sellers. She will also continue offering her signature Ish Bites, ChickN Sandwich and jalapeño poppers, as well as other vegan savory and sweet items. A talented home cook, Trezel began experimenting with vegan cuisine about six years ago as a way to help mitigate her dietary issues. She quickly found that not only did she feel better, she fell in love with vegan cooking and developed an extensive repertoire of dishes that her family and friends raved about. However, she had no plans to open a vegan restaurant. Instead, she originally envisioned CC’s as an icee shop inspired by the ones she loved to visit on trips to Harlem in New York City. With that business plan in mind, she opened the doors to her original Alton, Illinois, location in May 2019, only to shift to a full-fledged vegan eatery six weeks later, after her family members encouraged her to do so. For two years, she ran the Alton CC’s, finding success throughout the challenges of the pandemic and making a name for herself as one of the most thrilling vegan restaurants in the area. She credits the allure to her deeply flavorful, comfort-food style that reinterprets familiar meat-based dishes in plant-based form. Brown is thrilled to soon offer those dishes to a St. Louis audience. From the idea’s inception, she thought she’d open CC’s in south city, and even came close to inking a lease on Cherokee Street. However, when that deal fell through, she

leave. His cowor er of seventeen years, enise rice, chimes in while setting up her tables for the a.m. rush: “ t’s not ust chic en it’s tradition. n

CC’s Vegan Spot is planting roots in South St. Louis this coming month. | COURTESY CC’S VEGAN SPOT decided on the Alton location because it was close to her home. Though she loved the spot and had decent support from the locals, 80 percent of her business came from St. Louis. It made the move to Loughborough Avenue a no-brainer, even though she says she will always hold the Alton location close to her heart. Brown has planned a soft opening of the new location for June 25 and hopes to open the first week of July. She is excited that the new digs will have a smaller, but more useful footprint that will make

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it easier to manage. She’s also looking forward to the new place’s patio seating, which she believes will be an asset as the industry continues to face pandemicrelated challenges. “Everything is falling into place, and this is just such a blessing,” Brown says. “I’ve worked hard too, though. This is two years of getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed at midnight. Am I scared? Yes. Am I nervous? Yes. This is a whole other level and opportunity, that it feels like I am dreaming.” n

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RIVERFRONT TIMES

[FOOD NEWS]

Solve for Pie Pizza Champ, from the team behind Elmwood, is coming to Maplewood this fall Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

hen Elmwood (2704 Sutton Boulevard, Maplewood; 314-261-4708) reopens its dining room on June 10, it will look a little bit different than it did before the pandemic shuttered its doors last March ... at least temporarily. Owners Adam Altnether and Chris Kelling announced that they will resume dine-in service as a pizzeria for the next three months in anticipation of opening a brick and mortar for its pop-up-turned-pizza brand, Pizza Champ, this fall. “Even before the pandemic, Adam and I have always said that our second concept should be a pizzeria,” Kelling says. “Really, there isn’t a true pizzeria in Ma-

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Pizza Champ started as a side project and is now getting a storefront of its own. | SPENCER PERNIKOFF plewood, and when we had to decide what was going to work with carry-out during the pandemic, pizza was familiar. It became its own thing, and we had a number of orders from people who I don’t think ever stepped inside of Elmwood. We wanted to capitalize on that. We’re in negotiations for a lease for a pizzeria, but we wanted to keep the pizza in front of people.” Altnether and Kelling began

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selling pizzas as a way to keep Elmwood afloat last spring, but in no time, it became such a success that it took on a life of its own. This prompted the partners to get serious about exploring it as a brand in its own right, and they are on the cusp of making that come to fruition. However, they are not there quite yet. Because they still have to finali e their lease agreement and convert the space into Pizza

Champ, they have found themselves in a position where they are ready to reopen Elmwood, but not quite ready to open Pizza Champ as a standalone spot. Rather than ceasing their successful pizzeria operations, they decided to temporarily reopen Elmwood as a pizzeria while they work to open the doors of Pizza Champ, hopefully in the next three months or so. Kelling is clear that the changes to Elmwood are only temporary. Both he and Altnether are excited to get Elmwood back to where it was, pre-pandemic, as soon as possible, and they look forward to having two different restaurants that serve two very different purposes in the Maplewood dining scene. In the interim, Kelling expects the temporarily pizza-focused Elmwood to actually be a blend of the two concepts; in addition to pizza, Altnether will be cooking Elmwood’s signature burger, assorted skewers and other dishes that, in his words, have the “Elmwood DNA.” “There have been a lot of changes since we started this project,” Kelling says. “What’s still important to us is putting out quality product and making our guests happy. This will allow us to have a little more fun doing it.” n

REEFERFRONT TIMES [DISPENSARY REVIEW]

Tommy Chims Smokes N’Bliss Cannabis’ Weed Written by

THOMAS CHIMCHARDS

n the Wild West days of cannabis prohibition and an unregulated black market, strain names frequently amounted to little more than a sales gimmick. Oftentimes, when a dealer would claim to know the name of the strain he was trying to sell you, he was actually completely full of shit. In many cases, he was handed an unmarked sack of greenery by whoever his supplier was, who would give him some name for it that no one could ever confirm. Still other times the dealer would just make some shit up, knowing well that a strain dubbed “Snoop’s Secret Stash” or whatever is going to pique the interest of your average stoner more than some noname sack of buds. Then, of course, there’s the classic drug-dealer twist on the ol’ bait-and-switch. It goes like this: Your dealer claims to have two different strains of weed, one named, oh, I dunno, “Tommy’s Top-Tier” and the other, perhaps, “Chimchards’ Delight.” That Tommy weed, he’ll e plain, is really great stuff, definitely nothing to sneeze at, and comes in at $50 an eighth. But this Chimchards’ Delight — oh man, this is really awesome stuff, much better than most of the dreck in town, very special, wow. The only issue is that it’s a little pricey — $60 an eighth — so if you’d rather just go with the Tommy stuff that’s understandable. Ask any such unscrupulous dealer and they’ll tell you: No one ever, ever picks the cheaper stuff

— not with such an intriguing sales pitch. But here’s the secret: It was all the exact same weed, and you just got taken for ten bucks. It’s for these reasons that I was always skeptical of strain names when purchasing on the black market. But now that I get my weed from the dispensaries, it’s opened up a whole new world, one in which I can become familiar with the effects of a strain that I like and then seek it out deliberately to replicate those effects, with no concern that the person selling to me is completely full of shit. Which is exactly what brought me to N’Bliss’ Ellisville location on a recent afternoon in search of an eighth of Gorilla Glue. A famously potent strain I’d sampled in preroll form for last week’s review, GG4, as it’s sometimes known, was so effective at tamping down my chronic pain that I decided to seek it out in a larger quantity, and N’Bliss’ website indicated that it had eighths of it in stock from Flora Farms. Since the pre-roll I’d

The Flora Farms-branded Gorilla Glue (a.k.a. GG4) stocked by N’Bliss packs a wallop and is great for pain.| THOMAS CHIMCHARDS tried was Clovr-branded, I decided that it was fair game to sample the same strain in back-to-back reviews, though I’ll also admit that my overall desire to not be in pain when at all possible definitely factored into this decision. N’Bliss is located in a small strip

S T HIGHER THOU G H From the altered mind of

THOMAS CHIMCHARDS Welcome to Higher Thoughts, wherein ol’ Tommy Chims smokes one strain from this review — in this case, Gorilla Glue — and then immediately writes whatever comes to mind in the hopes of giving you, dear reader, a clearer picture of its overall mental effects: no rules, no predetermined word counts and, most crucially, no editing. Here we go: IN RESPONSE TO his endless airing of our dirty financial laundry over the years — constantly jumping on television and telling everyone just what we in the St. Louis area are using our money for — I propose a TV news segment called “Elliott Davis Paid For It.” We send a cameraman and a reporter to follow him when he leaves his house and catalog all the things he spends his money on and, like, dig through his trash for receipts and stuff like that, and then blindside him about it unexpectedly with cameras rolling. “Mr. Elliott Davis, the cashier you

just dealt with is working deep undercover for us, and she reports that you just paid for multiple store warranties on a stash of small electronics. How do you respond to these allegations?” “Mr. Elliott Davis, according to this receipt we found on the floorboard of your car you purchased SIX tacos on your most recent trip to Jack in the Box. Wouldn’t you agree that four is enough tacos?” “Mr. Elliott Davis, why did you spend your money on a lawyer to file a restraining order against us?” I’ll grant that it doesn’t have any news value; I’m just saying I’d watch it, is all.

Was that helpful? Who knows! See you next week. Thomas K. Chimchards is RFT’s resident cannabis correspondent and regular consumer of six or more tacos. Email him tips at tommy.chims@riverfronttimes.com and follow him on Twitter at @TOMMYCHIMS

mall on Manchester Road, sandwiched between a medical supply store and a doggy daycare. Upon walking in the door you enter a waiting area containing a front desk, a selection of the shop’s CBD products and apparel, and a few chairs. I didn’t have to wait any time at all after handing my ID and medical card over to the woman behind the desk, and I was promptly led to the shop’s sales floor. There, under a large sign that reads “Helping individuals find their path to liss, is a long, lighted glass case displaying the shop’s flower options, with a second glass case on the left-hand side containing its edibles. N’Bliss stocks a good-sized selection of the local cannabis flower brands. n addition to the Flora Farms products, it carries stuff from Proper, C4 and Sinse, amounting to more than a dozen strains — more than most dispensaries I’ve visited thus far. Along with the eighth of Gorilla Glue that brought me here ($54.99), I picked up a gram of Love Affair ($19.99) and a bag of THC-infused chocolate chip cookies ($39.99). After taxes, my total came to $129.90. Naturally, I got into the Gorilla Glue first. This lora arms batch came with a lower THC rating than the C4 pre-roll I sampled last week — 17.1 percent, compared to 19.41 percent — so I was unsure if it would be as effective. Upon opening the bag I was met with some tight, dense lightgreen to lime-green buds, frosted with trichomes and a dash of Continued on pg 30

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N’Bliss’ Ellisville shop is one of three locations the chain of dispensaries currently has open in the St. Louis area. | COURTESY N’BLISS CANNABIS

N’BLISS

Continued from pg 29

orange hairs. On breakup, there was a strong fuel-like smell, and the buds crumbled apart easily enough, though they left my fingers pretty stic y. n inhale, that fuel taste was prominent but pleasant, and soon I found myself suitably stoned, with my chronic pain once again delightfully soothed. This batch of Gorilla Glue was definitely less stupefying than the C4 stuff, and I found myself far less spaced-out and forgetful, though I was forgetful enough that I walked away from my notes in the middle of writing about how not forgetful I was and didn’t remember to return for a good half-hour or so. Do with that information what you will. Next up I tried out the Love Affair. A Proper-branded strain boasting a whopping 27.76 percent THC, these buds were dark green on the outside, almost purple, and got lighter and lighter on breakup until there was a whiteish green in the center. Breaking these up with my fingers was nearly impossible; the buds were super dense and hard, and ripping chunks off with my nails reminded me of trying to tear apart a hunk of Bazooka gum — a grinder is highly recommended. The smell was grassy, but with something light in the background that reminded me of a clean hospital room filled with unidentified Chinese food — very pleasant. On inhale, too, it was outstanding, with that fuel-like taste and its accompanying feeling in the sinuses. This strain left me feeling focused and energized, and

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definitely more of a sativa high — super potent, but good for getting stuff done. The cookies were described to me by my budtender as “dangerous,” and he wasn’t lying. The Sweet Stone-branded bag contains ten shortbread cookies total, each packed with ten milligrams of THC, but you’d never know there was anything cannabis-related in them if you didn’t read the bag. I couldn’t detect a weed taste at all, just buttery deliciousness coupled with white and milk chocolate chips, and the cookies melted in my mouth as I was eating them. If these came by the sleeve, I’d have eaten an entire sleeve — they’re that delicious — but being that they pack a pot punch, I only had three. About 40 minutes after consuming them I started to feel a head high, and by an hour in I felt my pain subside as a relaxing body high kicked in. It all was very pleasant and soothing, not at all overwhelming, and I found myself super interested in listening to music, feeling as though I could hear details and sounds that I’d never noticed before in songs I’d heard a thousand times. Highly recommended. In this new, regulated world of legal cannabis, it’s nice to have some reliability in strains, even across growers — I was a bit skeptical as to whether I’d see similar pain-relieving results from the Flora Farms batch as I did from the C4 pre-roll, but I was pleasantly surprised. It would seem we’re leaving some of the shady practices and gimmicky bullshit of an unregulated black market in the rearview mirror — and that’s definitely something worth celebrating. n

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CULTURE

[ WA L K I N G ]

Take a Hike ‘Walk the Walk’ in Tower Grove Park promotes self-love Written by

VICTOR STEFANESCU

one-of-a-kind event — stuffed with double dutch, a 5k walk, live music and vendors — is coming to Tower Grove Park to boost self-love and self-care within the Black community. “We are promoting the importance of mental, physical, and emotional well-being,” writes Leslie Hughes, an event organizer, in an email to the RFT. “We want guests to see and feel the value in that and hope they leave encouraged to either start or carry on a healthy lifestyle.” The June 13 “Walk the Walk” will be hosted by Frizzy by Nature, a nonprofit founded by Hughes that promotes confidence among women, largely through Frizz Fest, an annual natural-beauty festival that attracted thousands of attendees in 2019, as well as

[ PA R A D E S ]

America’s Birthday Parade Set For July 3 Written by

JAIME LEES

he America’s Birthday Parade is returning to downtown St. Louis on July 3, and for 2021 it’s bringing something a little extra special. The theme of the patriotic parade this year is “America the Beautiful” and not only will it highlight all that is lovely in this country from sea to shining sea, but it will also include elements from St. Louis’ Annie Malone, PrideFest and St. Patrick’s Day parades, all of which were canceled last year as a result of the pandemic. This family-friendly outdoor parade will roll down Market Street and will in-

RIVERFRONT TIMES

A 2020 Walk the Walk attendee poses for a photo. | PHILLIP ELLINGTON OWENS Dear Fathers, a media platform telling the stories of Black fathers, according to a news release. The event, starting at 11 a.m. and ending at 3 p.m., costs $25, and both in-person and virtual registration options are available through an Eventbrite page. This year’s Walk the Walk follows an inaugural 2020 event which drew 200 registrants, according to the release. Registrants will be given a t-shirt and a knapsack. “Last year’s event was such an clude nearly two dozen floats, fourteen local and national marching bands, and more than 250 dancers. Attendees can also expect to see giant helium balloons and antique fire engines. The parade will also feature musical performances by Audri Bartholomew of The Voice, SJ McDonald of American Idol and St. Louis’ own Red and Black Brass Band. “We are so excited to bring the America’s Birthday Parade back this year,” says St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones. “It makes me proud that they’re bringing together other organizations who had to cancel their own parades, leading with a spirit of collaboration that St. Louis and the whole country can appreciate. I encourage everyone to celebrate however they feel comfortable, and to consider the health and safety of their fellow paradegoers as they come together downtown to celebrate.” The parade starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 3, and will march west from South Broadway Avenue and Market Street (at Kiener Plaza) all the way to

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amazing time and great turnout, we just want to continue that same positive energy and impact as many more people as possible,” Hughes says in the release. This year, Hughes expects more vendors at Walk the Walk than last year. A fitness instructor will lead a warmup before the 12 p.m. walk, and attendees will be required to wear masks and socially distance whenever possible, Hughes writes. She thinks partnering with Dear

Fathers will help communicate the event’s themes of self-love and self-care to everyone, including men and children. “We believe that partnering with Dear Fathers will encourage more men and families to come out and enjoy the event,” Hughes writes. “Both Dear Fathers and Frizzy By Nature both operate with the Black community in mind by creating positive outlets in various forms.” Organizers created Walk the Walk last year after Frizz Fest, Frizzy by Nature’s signature event, was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the release says. Frizz Fest, which took place annually between 2017 and 2019, grew in attendance from 600 RSs its first year, to , in , according to Frizzy by Nature’ website. That event is expected to return this year as well, but Hughes writes that getting approval for a 2021 Frizz Fest from the City of St. Louis has been prolonged due to changes in COVID-19 restrictions. “The need for change in 2020 is what really inspired the pivot from Frizz Fest to Walk the Walk,” Hughes says in the release. “We wanted to create an event where we as a people could come together for much needed self-love and self-care, and do so safely.” For registration and more information, visit bit.ly/3wD9Awn. n

For amber waves of grain (and more than a little red, white and blue) head to the America’s Birthday Parade this year. | ROBERT COUSE-BAKER/VIA FLICKR 18th Street and Market Street (near Union Station). Attendees are encouraged to bring their own lawn chairs. And if you can’t attend but would still like to see the parade, it will be broadcast live

on KMOV (Channel 4). Visit AmericasBirthdayParade.com for more details on featured performances, parking information, health and safety guidelines, and more. n

The new Apotheosis location will be the corner of Jefferson and Cherokee. | PAUL SABLEMAN/FLICKR

[COMICS]

A New Headquarters for Heroes Apotheosis Comics is opening on Cherokee Street in Foam Coffee’s former home Written by

JAIME LEES

t’s been a rough year for retail, but Apotheosis Comics is here to save the day with the announcement of its upcoming expansion. There will soon be two Apotheosis Comics locations in St. Louis, with the South Grand Boulevard location soon to be joined by the opening of a new spot at 3359 South Jefferson Avenue. This new location is the former home

[ PA R A D E S W I T H C A R S ]

Pride Care-A-Van Returns for 2021 Written by

JAIME LEES

hen the usual Pride celebrations couldn’t happen last year, a “Pride Care-A-Van” was organized instead. The Care-A-Van is a parade of cars that drives around St. Louis spreading LGBTQ pride, awareness and love. The event is back this year and will run from noon until 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 6. Since Tower Grove Pride has been bumped to September, the Care-A-Van is

of Foam Coffee & Beer, which sadly folded in December 2019 after a decade of hosting some amazing live music. In addition to offering an expanded selection of graphic novels, pop culture items and art, Apotheosis’ new corner shop will also open a to-go coffee service at its Cherokee Street entrance “in partnership with a well-known local coffee company,” according to a news release. If coffee isn’t your thing, the new Apotheosis will also have canned cocktails and beers on hand and a sidewalk patio which can seat as many as 50 people. “After a year of surviving COVID, we are extremely proud to be able to expand our small business to a new location,” said Apotheosis Comics co-owner Martin Casas. “Having two venues allows us to broaden what we can provide to our community.” Renovations on the new Cherokee Street location began late last month, with a soft opening planned for early August. The grand opening of the new shop will be on Free Comic Book Day on Saturday, August 21. n

a good way to safely celebrate Pride during actual Pride month. The slow procession of honking and rainbow-decorated cars will be rolling through the Central West End, Midtown, Downtown, Soulard, Tower Grove South, the Grove and Cherokee Street that afternoon — and they’re even suggesting some viewing locations along the way so you can get a great view while cheering the cars on with others. On the map of the route, you can see the streets the caravan will be traveling and some local businesses that serve as community gathering spots. The map features estimated viewing times calculated so you don’t have to wait around all day for the fun to begin. If you’re watching (or participating) in the Pride Care-A-Van, you’re encouraged to dress up or decorate to show your support. You can find more information about the event at bit.ly/3fOXkSX. n

St. Vincent will perform at the Pageant on Friday, October 8. | ZACHERY MICHAEL

Vaxxed & Relaxxed Got the shot, you’re free to fly! Not yet? Here’s this week’s list of reasons why you should Compiled by

DANIEL HILL THIS WEEK

THE BURNEY SISTERS: ri., une , p.m., . Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . MAMMOTH PIANO: W/ DJ Whiz, Sat., June 5, 7 p.m., $20. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . MELODY DEN: Sun., June 6, 1:30 p.m., $15. Off roadway, Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . SCHOOL OF ROCK: ri., une , p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . STEEL PANTHER: W/ Adelitas Way, Thu., June , p.m., . Chesterfield Amphitheater, eterans lace rive, Chesterfield. TORCHLIGHT PARADE VINYL RELEASE PARTY: W/ Atlas on Fire, C20, Sat., June 5, 7 p.m., $5. Red lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, .

THIS JUST IN

105.7 THE POINT’S A BIG SUMMER SHOW: W/ the Urge, Soul Asylum, Local H, Juliana Hatfield, Sat., Aug. , p.m., . . . St. Louis Music Park, 750 Casino Center Dr., Maryland Heights, . 3 DOORS DOWN: W/ Chayce Beckham, Sun., Sept. , p.m., . . St. Louis Music

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Park, 750 Casino Center Dr., Maryland Heights, . BRAD PAISLEY: W/ Jimmie Allen, Kameron Marlowe, Fri., July 30, 7:30 p.m., TBA. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City pwy., Maryland Heights, . EL MONSTERO: the Schwag, Sat., uly , 7 p.m., $19.95. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland Heights, . FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE: W/ Russell Dickerson, Lauren Alaina, Sat., Oct. 16, 7:30 p.m., $39.50$139.50. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland Heights, . FOO FIGHTERS: W/ Radkey, Tue., Aug. 3, 7:30 p.m., TBA. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland Heights, . JIMMIE VAUGHAN: Sun., ct. , p.m., . ld oc House, S. th St., St. Louis, . JORDAN DAVIS: W/ Seaforth, MacKenzie Porter, Sat., Dec. 11, 7:30 p.m., $27.50. The actory, N uter d, Chesterfield, . LARKIN POE: ed., Sept. , p.m., . $30. Delmar Hall, 6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, . NATHANIEL RATELIFF & THE NIGHT SWEATS: Margo rice, Sat., ct. , p.m., . $69.50. St. Louis Music Park, 750 Casino Center r., Maryland Heights, . THE ROBERT CRAY BAND: Tue., Aug. 17, 7:30 p.m., . . . Chesterfield Amphitheater, eterans lace rive, Chesterfield. ST. VINCENT: ri., ct. , p.m. The ageant, elmar lvd., St. Louis, . WERQFEST: W/ Maxi Glamour, DJ Kimmy Nu,Tre G, Eric Dontè, Be.Be., Paige Alyssa, Golliday, Bynk Bravado, Blanca the Bawdy, Jay-Marie is Holy, Leethal The Poet, 6MR J.J., Ciera anyel, Sat., une , p.m., . City Foundry, 3730 Foundry Way, st. louis, .

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MUSIC LISTINGS Continued from pg 33

UPCOMING

THE 45: W/ Sixes High, Catalytic Creator, Brave New orld, ri., une , p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . AMERICAN AQUARIUM: W/ Morgan Wade, Wed., uly , p.m., . . elmar Hall, elmar lvd., St. Louis, . ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL: ri., une , p.m., . ri., une , p.m., . The o Theatre, 527 N. Grand Blvd., St. Louis, . ATOMIC JUNKSHOT: W/ Into the Blue, Niko, No Point, Sun., July 11, 7:30 p.m., $12. Red Flag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . THE BLACK CROWES: Sat., July 31, 7:30 p.m., $29-$250. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland Heights, . BLACK PISTOL FIRE: Sat., uly , p.m., $25. Delmar Hall, 6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, . BRAD PAISLEY: W/ Jimmie Allen, Kameron Marlowe, Fri., July 30, 7:30 p.m., TBA. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland Heights, . BROTHER LEE AND THE LEATHER JACKALS: Sat., June 26, 6 p.m., $20. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . BUCKCHERRY: Sun., une , p.m., . op’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . CEREMONY OF DARKNESS: W/ Powjr72, DaisyChain, Cyberstein, Sat., June 26, 7:30 p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . CHAOS BLOOM EP RELEASE SHOW: W/ RosesHands, Split , Tanu is, ri., une , p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . CHAOS COLLECTIVE: W/ Provoke the Colossus, Tanukis, Close to Zero, Sun., July 25, 7:30 p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . CITY OF PARKS EP RELEASE CELEBRATION: W/ Isabella, For The City, Freddy D’Angelo, Fri., une , p.m., . op’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . DEF LEGGEND: A TRIBUTE TO DEF LEPPARD: Fri., une , p.m., . op’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . DOMINATION: A TRIBUTE TO PANTERA: W/ Beneath The Remains: A Tribute To Sepultura, Killer Of Giants: A Tribute To Ozzy Osbourne, Sat., June 12, 7:30 p.m., $10-$12. Pop’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . EL MONSTERO: the Schwag, Sat., uly , p.m., $19.95. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland Heights, . ELI YOUNG BAND: Thu., July 15, 6 p.m., TBA. Chesterfield Amphitheater, eterans lace rive, Chesterfield. FAITHFUL STRAYS: Sun., July 11, 1:30 p.m., $15. ff roadway, Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . GHOST IN DECAY: W/ Ending Orion, Chaos Collective, Warheadd, Sat., June 19, 7:30 p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . GRANGER SMITH: ri., uly , p.m., . The Pageant, 6161 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, . HALF GALLON AND THE MILK JUGS: W/ DaisyChain, Pioneer Salesmen, Redwood, Fri., July , : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . HELLZAPOPPIN CIRCUS SIDESHOW REVUE: Sat., uly , p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . HUMANS & STRANGERS: W/ Pioneer Salesmen, Tyler Samuels Project, Niko, Sun., June 13, : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, .

IMPENDING DOOM: Sat., une , : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . INIMICAL DRIVE: W/ Outrun the Fall, Inner Outlines, Sat., July 17, 7:30 p.m., $15. Red Flag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . JAMEY JOHNSON: W/ Whiskey Myers, Folk Uke, Thu., une , : p.m., . Chesterfield Amphitheater, 631 Veterans Place Drive, Chesterfield. JUSTIN MOORE: W/ Heath Sanders, Thu., June , p.m., . The ageant, elmar lvd., St. Louis, . KODY WEST: W/ Grady Spencer and the Work, Thu., une , p.m., . ff roadway, Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . KOE WETZEL: ri., une , p.m., . Chesterfield Amphitheater, eterans lace rive, Chesterfield. LEE BRICE: W/ Lainey Wilson, Sat., June 12, p.m., . Chesterfield Amphitheater, eterans lace rive, Chesterfield. LIGHTS OVER ARCADIA: W/ Sonic Candy, Superic , Superhero oc stars, Sat., une , p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . LUCERO: W/ John Henry, Sat., July 31, 7 p.m., . Chesterfield Amphitheater, eterans lace rive, Chesterfield. LUXORA EP RELEASE SHOW: W/ Conman Economy, White Rose, Make Your Mark, Young Animals, Sat., July 10, 7:30 p.m., $12. Red Flag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . MANESS BROTHERS: W/ DJ Ronnie Wisdom, Sat., June 12, 7 p.m., $20. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . NEKO CASE: Sun., une , p.m., . The Sheldon, ashington lvd., St. Louis, . NEST: W/ Thirty Six Red, Grey Flower, Emery uinn, Sun., uly , : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . ONE MORE TIME: A TRIBUTE TO DAFT PUNK: Thu., une , : p.m., . op’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . PARKER MCCOLLUM: W/ Andrew Jannakos, Thu., uly , p.m., . The ageant, elmar lvd., St. Louis, . POWJR72: W/ the Pesky Flies, Moon Watching, ri., uly , : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . ROAST WAR CHAMPIONSHIP: Thu., July 29, p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . SCOTTY MCCREERY: W/ Tenille Arts, Fri., July , p.m., . The ageant, elmar lvd., St. Louis, . SECULAR ERA: W/ Wadis, Moon Watching, Sun., une , : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . SHAVED CAT PROJECT: W/ Misplaced Religion, ri., uly , : p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . SISSER: Fri., June 25, 7 p.m., $15. Off Broadway, Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . STEFFINE URKELL: T , udeboyy T-Real, RudeGall Miss Piggy, D’Frynce, Diallo St. Clair Cee Los, Tu , Sat., une , p.m., . op’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . TOMMY VEXT: Tue., uly , p.m., . op’s Nightclub, Monsanto Ave., ast St. Louis, . TOWN CARS: W/ Sandy Beaches, Sat., June 19, 7 p.m., $20. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . VOIDGAZER ALBUM RELEASE SHOW: W/ Defcon, Scu , Swamp Lion, ri., uly , p.m., . ed lag, Locust Street, St. Louis, . WERQFEST: W/ Maxi Glamour, DJ Kimmy Nu,Tre G, Eric Dontè, Be.Be., Paige Alyssa, Golliday, Bynk Bravado, Blanca the Bawdy, Jay-Marie is Holy, Leethal The Poet, 6MR J.J., Ciera anyel, Sat., une , p.m., . City Foundry, 3730 Foundry Way, St. Louis, . YARD EAGLE: W/ Oregon Space Trail of Doom, ri., uly , p.m., . ff roadway, Lemp Ave., St. Louis, . n

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SAVAGE LOVE QUICKIES BY DAN SAVAGE Hey, Dan: I had a stroke a year ago. The woman I was dating at the time stepped away. I have no hard feelings but I long for intimacy again. I am profoundly grateful that I don’t have any major outward injuries from the stroke, but my stamina is still very low and might always be. That makes me self-conscious and insecure about sex. Would it be “over-sharing” if I told someone about my stroke before we go to bed for the first time? It seems like it will kill the mood and almost certainly make things less fun. Am I obligated to share this information? Outwardly Okay Privately Struggling You’re not obligated to share this kind of health information before going to bed with someone for the first time, S, but you might wanna share it. At the root of your worries about post-stroke stamina is a fear of falling short of a new partner’s expectations — expectations shaped by assumptions a new partner might about your stamina based on your overall appearance of good health. esetting your partner’s expectations will take the pressure off — indeed, if you tell a new partner you recently had a stro e, S, you’ll most li ely e ceed her (reset) expectations. And that could give your se ual self confidence a welcome boost. Hey, Dan: I’m a recently separated 42-year-old straight male. I’m internet dating for the first time, and I met an awesome girl who makes me laugh, makes me playlists on Spotify, and is just generally amazing. Of course there’s a glitch: I’m not attracted to her. I tried but I think the romantic relationship needs to end. She has mentioned several times in the last couple of months that I treat her better than anybody she’s ever dated. (That blows my mind — apparently cooking dinner, occasional flowers, and returning texts puts me head and shoulders above everyone else?) My question: How do you break that kind of news to someone without looking like an asshole? Anxiously Hesitating Over Looming End

Spea ing of e pectations You’re a newly separated man and you’ve only been seeing this woman for a couple of months. If her expectations were reasonable and she ept them in chec , AH L , then she nows the odds were stacked against something long term. She’ll still be sad about the relationship ending and she might thin you’re an asshole for ending it — she might actually need to thin you’re an asshole to cauterize the emotional wound (so don’t argue with her if she calls you an asshole — but if you didn’t ma e any premature declarations of undying love, AH L , then she’s unli ely to thin you’re an asshole forever. And loo ing on the bright side: she may be less li ely to put up with guys who don’t coo , don’t come through with flowers, and don’t respond to her texts in a reasonable amount of time after being with you.

Who knows? He may be willing to give non-monogamy a try once the pandemic ends.

Hey, Dan: My friend’s grandmother was walking through a park when she was accosted by a man asking for sex. (Yes, my friend’s grandmother.) The man wasn’t violent. It was more of a plea for physical affection but definitely one that was made in a rapey way. He had something in his hand but it wasn’t a weapon: it was a negative COVID-19 test. He showed it to her as if to say, “It’s OK! I’m not a real threat!” Is this what we’ve come to as a society? Is the isolation people have suffered over the last year going to result in the rate of sexual assault going up? Pandemic’s Awful Reality Keeps Scaring

You don’t have to end it after finding someone else you wanna fuc — or before — but you will need to give this guy a heads up before you fuc someone else. And who nows? He may be willing to give non monogamy a try once the pandemic ends (perhaps onesided non monogamy, e.g. you’re free to sleep with other people and he’s free to remain monogamous to you , T AN, ust as you were willing to give monogamy a try while the pandemic raged. He’s significantly younger but assume he’s an adult (he is an adult, right? and, as an adult, he’s free to make his own choices. Your only obligation is to ensure he has all the information he needs to ma e a fully informed choice.

The combination of our politics and this pandemic seems to have bro en some people, A S, and brought out the barely suppressed absolute worst in others. I fear things are going to get a lot shittier before they get any better — in our par s, in our politics, and ust generally on our planet. Here’s hoping humanity manages to e ceed my e pectations. Hey, Dan: I’m dating someone 13 years younger than me. He’s a monogamous man and I am not a monogamous woman. We’ve been monogamous due to the pandemic but with the explicit understanding that we won’t work out in the long term due to our different opinions

en wouldn’t be into this scenario. So that’s a reason not to do it. But on the other hand, they wouldn’t know. I realize this depends on actually executing the plan with discretion but that seems doable. Thoughts? Seeking Perspectives In Ethical Dating

on monogamy. I will be vaccinated soon but I don’t want to break up with him after I get the hots for someone else. That seems like a dick move. My lizard brain tells me that if he would explore nonmonogamy he’d come to the conclusion that it’s a good approach. Should I put on my big girl pants and break it off? Rip Off The Bandage Albeit Nicely

Hey, Dan: Bi-girl, early thirties, in an open relationship with a man. A question of ethics. Say I’m on the apps looking to hook up with women. I’m upfront that I’m in an open relationship and looking for casual fun. I have no intention of trying to leverage these dates into threesomes with me and my boyfriend. But it turns my boyfriend on to hear about fun I have with other people. Would it be wrong to let my boyfriend come sit, anonymously, in a bar where I’m meeting a date? I’ll ignore him, he won’t stare or approach me and my date, he’ll just get a thrill out of being there. On the one hand, I assume most wom-

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This passes my ermissible Secret erving test which unpac at length in an upcoming book) — it passes the S test so long as the other woman doesn’t know your boyfriend is there and never finds out your boyfriend was there — but it fails the Golden ule test. Meaning, this probably isn’t something you would want others doing unto you and therefore isn’t something you should do unto others. So esus thin s you shouldn’t do this, S , and thin well, don’t thin you should. That’s too strong a word. ut definitely thin you could. Hey, Dan: Do you know what’s in commercial sex lubes? Chemicals. And chemicals are bad and unnatural. Seriously. I prefer olive oil or something else from the kitchen. But whenever I use cooking oils, I find that a tiny layer of dead cells sloughs off my cock. That isn’t a problem, but the cells seem to gather together and it feels like grains of sand. I’m assuming certain oils loosen dead skin cells and it causes this. Are there some oils that don’t do that? Stroking Not Sanding We use commercial sex lube at our place, SNS, and our coc s aren’t shedding dead skin cells at noticeable/clumpable rates or making our asses feel li e they’re pac ed with sand. And we do know what’s in our lube: our preferred brand, Spun , is made from avocado and coconuts oils and these ingredients, according to Spun ’s website, “are organic and chemical-free.” Now if you Google, say, “chemical composition of avocado oil, you learn that it, li e everything else — including your precious olive oil — is composed of various chemicals. Natural, not man made, but chemicals still. That said, SNS, if the oils you’re using as lube are causing your dic to disintegrate then you might wanna give Spun a chance. mail@savagelove.net @FakeDanSavage on Twitter www.savagelovecast.com

JUNE 2-8, 2021

RIVERFRONT TIMES

JUNE 2-8, 2021

riverfronttimes.com

JUNE 2-8, 2021

RIVERFRONT TIMES

JUNE 2-8, 2021

riverfronttimes.com

Riverfront Times, June 2, 2021

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