P/oed Patriot first broke the story of a reported sexual assault case which took place at the Occupy St. Louis encampment in downtown Keiner Plaza on November 8th:
According to the St. Louis Police website crime map, at 3:55 PM at the corner of North 7th Street and Market (the exact location of Kiener Plaza where Occupy St. Louis was camped out) a Sexual Offense occurred.
Why did this take ten days to make it to the mainstream media? Media tried to smear the tea party when they couldn’t find controversy, but this goes unreported for ten days?
Sharp Elbows interviewed St. Louis Police Sgt. Gary Wiegert who said he personally felt that the city’s mayor could have prevented this from happening:
[youtube QouzqI2imhg nolink]
CBS affiliate KMOV Channel 4 reported on the story this evening:
ST. LOUIS (KMOV.com) — A woman participating in the OccupySTL protest reported to police that a man sexually assaulted her while she was in her tent last Tuesday, three days before tents were removed by the city. A St. Louis City police officer says the mayor could have prevented it.
Brian E. King, 38, was charged with first degree sexual misconduct after police said he crawled into the victim’s tent and touched her breast. The assault happened on November 8 at the encampment that used to be set up in Kiener Plaza.
[…]
The mayor’s chief of staff says that Wiegert’s accusations are all about politics, and the staff points out that St. Louis did not have problems like other cities.
Occupy member John Mills says that crimes happened before the occupation, and the perpetrator in this case was not a regular participant. He does not think it should reflect on their movement.
The assault occurred at the protest and it would not have occurred had the protest not occurred. Mills can’t say for certain that the perpetrator isn’t a “regular participant.” So he’s kind of a participant? Mills stated that King isn’t a “regular participant” which suggests King had participated before. The words of Occupy St. Louis’s own organizer refutes the defense offered by its group on Twitter that King was “only tied by location.” The group insists that the press, which hadn’t reported on the assault for ten days, is also somehow “smearing” them over the actions of an “unregular” participant.
There’s already been fighting at this event; the fact that their numbers are smaller compared to the attendance in other cities has prevented the vandalism and violence, aside from the hacking of Mayor Slay’s website and the reported threat to Principia College. The city can’t exactly take credit for that; Slay’s office did little to discourage the encampment and even offered the group a “free permit,” something not offered to the tea party group which demonstrated there a year earlier under threat of a canceled event by the city should they not procure a permit or insurance.
The news report also mentions that Sgt. Wiegert acts as an unpaid lobbyist for the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition, something used to invalidate his criticism. Progressives like the military when they falsely claim police used rubber bullets on them in response to their rioting, but any other time they spit on and throw things at them. Since Sgt. Wiegert is not part of their movement, he is discounted.
Since KMOV reported this Occupystl attacked them on Twitter, accusing them of “pandering” to me simply because I’m in the media, discussed it on my radio show (KMOV and my flagship station are two media entities in the same city), and publicly @’ed me on Twitter with a link to their story while I was on air. The Occupy group seems more outraged over this than over the fact that a crime against a woman occurred at their event in the first place. Figure that one out.
*MORE from Adam Sharp replete with Marc Cox’s report on KMOV.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.