THE LAST WORD
Pearson, Natalie
THE LAST WORD Natalie Pearson Murder as Usual I work at a daily newspaper on Main Street and live in a neighborhood called North Hill, up from the one street that constitutes downtown Burlington,...
...When he was done, fourteen of them were dead...
...Mayor Ed King was killed and council members Joann Sankey and Ron Dupree were critically wounded...
...From the flag flying half-staff over the old county courthouse to the shocked faces of residents doing business on the city square, the place offered great visuals...
...Someone gets mad...
...Upset over a failing grade in his French class, the freshman killed a teacher and wounded three others who got in the way...
...Every time it happens, the media flock to the scene, get a few poignant or gory pictures, and splash the details across the wire for a day or two...
...Earlier this year, a frustrated postal worker in Edmond, Oklahoma, took a gun to work and started shooting his co-workers...
...Now that I know Burlington, the lock seems as safe a place as any to leave my keys, and I no longer flush when I find them there...
...The story is not unusual...
...Mount Pleasant was a picture-perfect setting for a television story...
...But they do, it seems, all the time...
...Four months later he used it...
...Davis, for instance, had done it before...
...I have a bad habit of leaving my keys in the lock on the front door...
...The story made great copy...
...A week before the shootings in Mount Pleasant, a fourteen-year-old in Lewis-town, Montana, went on a spree at his high school...
...My neighbors, at least those inclined to fret, worry about local kids putting concrete in their garage-door locks, or about whether the squirrels will eat all the seed in their backyard bird-feeders...
...Ralph is a heavyset, kindly-looking man...
...Davis had been planning his revenge on the City Council since July, when he went to his first meeting and complained about sewage backed up in his basement...
...Last year, when Davis decided he didn't like the songbirds in his Mount Pleasant neighborhood, he grabbed a gun and blew them out of the trees in his neighbor's yard...
...Once his three targets seemed dead, Davis sat down in a chair and waited for somebody to come arrest him...
...He grabs a gun...
...About this time last year, just up the road from Mount Pleasant, a farmer in Hills, Iowa, took his gun to town and killed the president of his bank...
...The Council didn't want to fix the mess, and wouldn't admit it was the city's fault...
...A typical small-town eccentric, he drank his own homemade beer, talked to his dog more than to any of his neighbors, and got kicked out of his only club, the Disabled American Veterans, for starting too many arguments...
...He starts shooting at whoever he thinks is the cause of his anger...
...The man went on to shoot his former business partner, and then killed his wife and himself...
...THE LAST WORD Natalie Pearson Murder as Usual I work at a daily newspaper on Main Street and live in a neighborhood called North Hill, up from the one street that constitutes downtown Burlington, Iowa, and just a few blocks from our one hospital and one library...
...This area shot into the news on December 10, when sixty-nine-year-old Ralph Davis walked into city hall in neighboring Mount Pleasant and tried to blow away the City Council...
...I panicked the first time it happened, imagining all the horrible criminals who would love to stumble onto my doorstep...
...At least it was until a few weeks ago...
...Friends said he was angry over losing his farm...
...People blow away their problems fairly often in this country...
...People in places like Mount Pleasant Natalie Pearson is a reporter for the Burlington Hawkey e. are not supposed to act as Davis did...
...Life here is unremarkably slow, usually too dull to merit attention from anyone outside Burlington...
...The assault is described as "shocking" and "bizarre" and everyone acts as if an unusually violent thing has happened—at least until the next week, when it happens somewhere else...
...When I run after dark in my neighborhood, the biggest hazard is tripping on the uneven brick in the century-old sidewalk...
...I feel safe here...
...They are not supposed to kill each other...
...The meeting was nearly over when Davis walked in, pulled a .22-caliber handgun out of his camouflage fabric coat, and shot eight bullets into three council members...
...The day after that first meeting, Davis went out, applied for a handgun permit, and bought a gun...
...Davis was angry because the neighbor's children had been throwing stones at his truck...
...Six years ago he shot and killed a neighbor in Bell Gardens, California...
...It happened about 9:30 on a Wednesday night...
Vol. 51 • February 1987 • No. 2
