Kansas City News Blog

Emanuel Cleaver II

​Neither Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II nor Jacob Turk, the Republican challenger who'd like to replace Cleaver in 2010, has taken part in the Department of Energy's Former Beryllium Workers Medical Surveillance Program for former Kansas City Plant employees, though coincidentally, they both worked there.

Cleaver worked at the Kansas City Plant when he first came to Kansas City in 1968; it was his first job after he graduated from the then-segregated Prairie View A&M. He worked as a quality control checker on the manufacturing line, which paid his bills while he worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Jacob Turk

​According to Danny Rotert, the Congressman's communications director, "He has spoken to other former employees who have had some health issues but he has not had any problems associated with beryllium."

Via e-mail, Turk tells The Pitch, "I worked at Bendix from 1982 to 1985 before leaving to start my own company. I have in the past been contacted by the company running the screening program for beryllium exposure and after an exhaustive conversation on the phone about the ins and outs of the program decided not to opt in.

"Once I found out there is no cure for berylliosis and that the program was just to monitor the progress of the disease, I made the decision not to trust my personal medical history to the government or a contractor and not to have a record of a pre-existing condition. ... I do believe more does need to be done for those who have developed berylliosis or chronic beryllium disease (CBD)."

​This week's Martin column describes neighborhood groups' frustration with Go Invest Wisely, a Utah company that gobbled up dozens of foreclosed homes in Kansas City.

Last month, Legal Aid of Western Missouri sent Go Invest Wisely a letter asking the company to sell or repair of its inventory of houses, many of which were bought for $7,000 and less. Legal Aid asked the company to respond by November 13, but the deadline passed without action. 

I took a look at some of the vacant houses Go Invest Wisely owns. The images aren't pretty. Click here for a slideshow.

Emily Henson

Roofer Marlon Smith worked at Honeywell and got sick

​As an interviewer and outreach manager with the Building Trades National Medical Screening Program, Walter Smith always starts out with one question: "Do you think your health was affected by your work at the Department of Energy site?" There are three possible answers: Yes, no and maybe.

"If you walked into that DOE site and you know you were healthy, then there's always that possibility that you could have gotten polluted," Smith says.

Since 2001, the government has offered monetary compensation and to pay the medical bills of anyone who might have gotten sick from working at Honeywell or any other DOE site. An amendment to the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program was signed by the president in 2004 to add Part E to the EEOICP, so that people who worked for contractors at DOE sites (an independent electric company, for example) could be eligible for compensation as well.

Marlon Smith is one such worker. He was a roofer for Schreiber, a company hired to repair Honeywell's roof on two separate projects, one in 2001, and again in 2005. He remembers wearing only a dust mask while standing yards away from employees who were fully suited with respirators. As they cut into the old roof, Marlon says, "I asked the foreman, I say, 'Hey, where's [my respirator]?' He says, 'Oh, it ain't toxic enough.'"

The roofers watched a film about safety before getting on Honeywell's roof, Marlon says. "The class was good, but ... on the roof, it's a different story. You get put in positions where you know it's not right to do this, but the bossman says 'do it,' and it's either that or not have a job."

​Kansas City, Missouri, does not lack for sad-looking houses. So when the city orders one of them to be demolished, you can be certain it's a real dump.

Go Invest Wisely, the subject of this week's Martin column, owns a house in the Northeast that's slated for demolition. The Utah-based company bought the Cypress Avenue house in the summer of 2008 for $6,125.

A player in the "bulk foreclosure" business, Go Invest Wisely buys homes on the cheap in the hopes of renting them or selling them to another investor. But only a bulldozer would see the potential in some of these places.

The Cypress house was a nuisance before Go Invest Wisely added it to its collection. A few weeks before Go Invest Wisely made the purchase, the city hired a contractor to board up its front door.

​Chemical spills. Buried drums of unknown substances. Teflon poisoning. PCB drippings. Mold. These are just some of the cringe-inducing details included in a Department of Labor summary of information gathered from workers and former workers of Honeywell's Kansas City Plant, where non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons have been manufactured for the last 60 years (Honeywell is the subject of this week's Pitch feature story).

The roundtable meeting occurred in Overland Park on October 4-5, 2006, before representatives from the DOL's Division of Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program. The meeting included a wide range of workers, including machinists, electrical assemblers, carpenters, clerks, drafting specialists, welders, union officers, pipefitters, painters, OSHA instructors and plastic fabricators, just to name a few. They reported having worked with more than fifty toxic substances including benzene, beryllium, DDT pesticide, fiberglass, formaldehyde and "radioactive sources."

Some highlights from the meeting's notes:

• No worker reported having hazardous material training prior to the late 1990s.

• Machinists reported receiving machine safety instructions, e.g., not to wear long-sleeve shirts when using machine shop tools, but no hazardous material training except how to put labels on chemical containers.

• An electronic assembler stated that one-time lessons learned training was provided following an explosion in the mid-to-late 1980s in which five firefighters were killed.

• Protection against toxic material exposure was described as ranging from no protection and the wearing of Tyvek/paper protective clothing during certain production operations, to limited use of respiratory protection.

• A process engineer indicated that HEPA vacuums were not used at beryllium machine tools until around year 2000.

• A machinist indicated that respiratory protection was not required during machining until 2000, and that it was routine practice for machinists to work in the same clothes they wore home.

When I spoke to Steve Russell for my story about Ripple Glass this week, he seemed to confirm my -- and many recyclers' -- fears about the fate of the bottles, cans and paper products we toss in our curbside bins each week.

Photo by Nicole Reinertson

Ripple Glass turns Boulevard Brewing's trash into Owens Cornings' treasure

​Russell is the St. Louis-area manager for Strategic Materials, one of the largest recycling companies in the country. For years, the facility in the Gateway City received a portion of Kansas City's glass recycling stream. But not everything that comes into the warehouse, Russell told me, leaves for reuse.

"We throw in the landfill 40 to 50 percent of it," Russell said of the often-contaminated loads of metal, glass and plastic. "It's just unusable."

Ripple Glass is changing the precarious and unknowable fate of Kansas City's recycled glass. Instead of being picked up by a waste hauler that hates the hassle and sent to a distant processing plant that may trash it, old beer bottles and pickle jars will never leave Kansas City. Instead of suspecting the worst, local residents who toss their empties in Ripple's collection bins know exactly where their glass is going: to an Owens Corning facility to be turned into insulation.

"A six pack will create enough insulation for an eight-foot wall cavity," says Gale Tedhams, the Ohio-based corporation's director of sustainability. "So, it really is up-cycling. The use of that glass will be even more valuable to the world. In the life of the building it could last 100 years or more. It's a great story."

One the By-Product Synergy Project is trying to replicate across the region.

At the launch party for Ripple Glass last week, the company's CEO, Stacia Stelk, was already reveling in the up-start company's success.

Photo by Nicole Reinertson

Stacia Stelk, CEO of Ripple Glass

​Outside, next to one of the giant, purple recycling bins, Stelk and Andy Barton, vice president of sales for Deffenbaugh Industries, spoke excitedly.

Earlier in the week, the two had watched as one of the first collection bins thumped onto the pavement in a lot near the corner of 51st and Main streets. That was 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. By Thursday afternoon, the massive bin was already completely full.

That isn't the only indication that area residents are eager and willing to unload their hoarded glass to jump-start the new recycling effort.

​As last week's feature, "Stop Hugging Us," showed, people's responses to trauma are so personal and unique that it's impossible to tailor a one-size-fits-all treatment to help them deal with their pain.

Most often, you're best to just stay out of the way.

If there's one thing doctors have learned, it's that you can't always anticipate human needs. Even if they seem obvious.

When Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida in 1992, Dr. Richard Gist of Kansas City helped with the recovery effort. Part of the job was making sure people -- many now homeless -- had the essentials.

"You end up doing this thing they call the 'FEMA salute' when you realize all the obvious things you missed," Gist says, and slaps his palm against his forehead.

In that case, relief workers didn't realize until about a week into the recovery they'd failed to provide people with one, important item.

"There was a big demand for condoms," Gist says. "And then you realize the lady of the house usually handled birth control in most cases, and now they couldn't just go to a pharmacy to get whatever contraceptive they used. A lot of them didn't want to ask because it was personal," Gist adds. "So we started throwing condoms in every bag of supplies we sent out so no one would have to ask for them."

Dr. Richard Gist

​This week's feature story, "Stop Hugging Us," looks at how research from the nearly 30-year-old Hyatt collapse is affecting treatment of post-traumatic stress treatment today. Turns out, it might be best to leave people alone, instead of making them talk about their feelings.

Like any good research, there was more than one test case, and this time that second group of subjects came from a plane crash in Sioux City, Iowa.

United Airlines flight 232 went down on July 19, 1981, en route to Chicago from Denver. A failure of the plane's No. 2 engine resulted in further breakdown of the plane's hydraulic systems. The plane broke up during emergency landing on a Sioux City runway, killing 110 of the 285 passengers.

For research purposes, the similarity of the disasters were helpful. Almost the exact same number of people had been killed -- though in case their backgrounds were more divergent than the metro residents killed in the Hyatt.

Richard Gist, a Kansas City researcher who'd studied the response to the Hyatt disaster, used the similarities to further examine stress reactions among emergency responders.

​Last week's cover story, "Historian in Chief," describes efforts by UMKC history professor and ex-Chief Pellom McDaniels to get Kansas City interested in its comprehensive history.

He wants to engage people at the street level -- to take history out of museums and academia and make people connect to it in everyday life -- but sometimes his drive for results outpaces the 18th & Vine district's ability to act.

McDaniels suggested installing informational placards in the historic Lincoln Building, which is one of the district's older buildings in use today. In its heyday from the '20s to the '50s, the building housed an assortment of doctors and dentists. McDaniels' proposed placards would have described the building's history and provided perspective on the building's founding.

​In the four decades since it closed, the Paseo YMCA has been a lot of things: historical emblem, graffiti sketchpad, and lately, a flophouse where the homeless around 18th and Vine crash.

If the directors of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum have their way, the building will get new life as the John "Buck" O'Neil Education and Research center.

The Paseo YMCA, located around the the corner from the museum complex, was completed in 1914, and quickly became the first stop for Kansas City's newest arriving African Americans. The building hosted literacy classes, vocational training and, as noted in this week's cover story, "Historian in Chief," the vote to organize the Negro National League in February, 1919.

Southmoreland.org

​Kansas City, Missouri's tax-increment financing (TIF) program gets criticized for enriching developers. TIF's defenders point to projects like the "Glover plan," which, in addition to delivering a Costco and a Home Depot, provided money for midtown homeowners to fix up their property.

Housing programs have become a popular add-on to various TIF plans. The TIF plan featured in this week's Martin column has made grants to residents in the Southmoreland neighborhood.

Eighty-nine homeowners in Southmoreland have taken part in the program. An additional $585,000 will become available. "I'm a big proponent of these housing programs," says Kate Corwin, a Southmoreland resident who serves on a committee that advises the TIF plan. "I think they're great."

To be sure, it's nice to see regular folks benefiting a program that developers and attorneys have used to trim their business cards in gold leaf. The community benefits, as well, because the money helps homeowners keep their exteriors looking nice.

But are TIF housing programs really fair?

1500 block of E. 18th St. Click the image for a slideshow.

​
What once was the commercial heart of Kansas City's black district is now a shell of its former self. This week's cover story, "Historian in Chief," details UMKC professor Pellom McDaniels' efforts to reacquaint Kansas City with its lost history, and reintroduce forgotten African American role models to inspire the next generation of historians.

This slideshow compares historic photos taken in the 1940 Tax Assessor's survey with present day pictures of the same places.

MySpace/dennishess

Chris Mitchell and Dennis Hess

​Chris Mitchell was a close friend and former fiancée of Dennis Hess, the former owner of Denim & Diamonds. Because space constraints and other complications prevented her from being quoted in the October 14 feature, "Denim & Death," she contributed this piece, sent to The Pitch via e-mail, for inclusion in our continuing coverage of the story.

Mitchell writes:

Dennis Hess was the love of my life.

We met about 15 years ago at Denim & Diamonds. He had his perch in the bar where he could sit and see most everything going on. It was from his favorite spot, a railing on the riser nearest the main bar, that he asked me out for the first time. That date started with my first visit to Corner Cafe, included a visit to his hometown of Atchison, Kansas, and ended enjoying the stars on his porch swing. That was the beginning of our years together.

Although I can't speak for the years between his last divorce and the beginning of our relationship, I would hardly describe Dennis as being "relatively unattached" before meeting Lena [Hess]. Dennis shared his love for Denim & Diamonds with me, but it was the sharing of his love for the friends he made there and the love of his family which I cherish most. He asked me to marry him on my birthday in 2002, and we were engaged when we met Lena.

from myspace.com/dennishess

​Dennis Hess died June 15. Three months earlier, he'd been hospitalized. According to his widow, Lena Hess, and her lawyer, Robert Arnold, Hess tried to commit suicide by mixing prescription drugs and alcohol. But his friends and family say the March incident was an accident.

In an interview with Sgt. Chad Phillips of the Platte County Sheriff's Department, Lena Hess described what her lawyer characterized as Dennis Hess' first suicide attempt. Lena said she received a call from Hess, who was staying in a hotel while the couple's divorce was pending. Lena said Hess told her he loved her and was going to kill himself. Lena said she called David and Tiffany Cox, Hess' friends, and asked them to go check on him. Arnold told Phillips that Hess left a suicide note, but that the Coxes ripped it up.

But that story differs from what a source very close to Hess tells The Pitch. Hess had recently been prescribed 10mg of Xanax and a steroid called prednisone. The source says that Hess wasn't accustomed to taking pills, having been healthy up until a cancer diagnosis in 2007. Additionally, Hess was weakened by the cancer treatments that required him to eat through a feeding tube attached to his stomach. The Xanax he was told to take three times daily was too strong a dose for him, the source says.

"He was fine," Hess' friend Deann Leddick told The Pitch in an earlier interview. "He just drank too much, [combined with] the pills and the anxiety ... he wasn't trying to off himself." 

The afternoon before Hess was hospitalized, Hess had gone with the Coxes and  Leddick to Bar 12 for a couple drinks. When the friends dropped Hess back off at the hotel, the source says, he talked with Lena over the phone, then called his daughter Michelle Cerruti in Las Vegas. He told Cerruti that he felt strange, and then it sounded as though the phone dropped from his hands. Cerruti called the front desk of the hotel, and the employee who picked up the phone knocked on Hess' door. Hearing no response, she called 911. Cerruti, meanwhile, asked David and Tiffany Cox to go check on her father.  

The confrontation this past July 7 between Lena Hess and the family of her deceased husband, Dennis Hess, was an alternately awkward and heartbreaking scene.


View Larger Map

The hearing, which took place before Circuit Judge Abe Shafer, was to determine whether to grant orders of protection filed by Lena against Dennis' daughters, Michelle Cerruti and Audra Wyatt, and his grandson, Kris Lane. Lena came with her attorney, Robert Arnold. Cerruti, Wyatt and Lane had no legal representation and chose to wing it, with mixed results.

The source of the dispute was a commotion that occurred at Dennis' funeral, which according to Arnold caused Lena to "fear for her safety." Arnold also cited a veiled threat, attributed to Lane and directed toward Lena, that appeared on a message board that exploded with comments shortly after Dennis' death.

Lena took the stand in a black skirt, sandals and a zebra-print top. Her hair looked unwashed, provoking unkind whispers from Dennis' supporters in attendance. Prompted by Arnold, she spoke about finding her husband dead on June 15, and about the day of his funeral.

Lena said she'd set up a display at the White Chapel Funeral Home in Dennis' honor: his $500 cowboy boots, a bottle of Crown Royal Special Reserve and a pack of Camel cigarettes. "These three," she said, motioning to the respondents' table, where Cerruti, Wyatt and Lane sat, "drank all the liquor and took all of Dennis' belongings." But she was never able to provide any evidence to back up those accusations.

Lena left before the end of the funeral service but testified that she heard that Lane tore down a poster depicting her and Dennis that was also on display. "He [Dennis] would not have been proud of how any of them acted that day," Lena said, provoking laughter from Dennis' supporters in the gallery.

"This is not a theater," Judge Shafer admonished.

Nadia Pflaum

A photo of Dennis Hess displayed at his June 25 memorial at Bar 12

​Denim & Diamonds owner Dennis Hess wasn't allowed to own a gun. Thirty-five years ago, Hess was convicted of selling drugs in Clay County, Missouri. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison on January 18, 1974, according to the results of a Missouri Highway Patrol background check. He served two years in prison and was released on probation on August 30, 1976. His punishment was complete on March 15, 1988, when the Missouri Board of Probation in Jefferson City took him off probation.

Hess was truly a self-made man, fashioning successful business ventures after he'd paid for his crime. He had faith in other people, former employees recall. Hess' forgiving nature may have been partly shaped by his recognition that he, too, was given a second chance.

The mother of one of Hess' daughters told The Pitch this summer that she'd never known Hess to be violent toward women. His fourth wife, Lena Hess, claimed the opposite in court filings. 

A former girlfriend of Hess', Karyn Grounds, filed a petition for an order of protection against Hess in 2001 in Platte County Circuit Court. On the petition, Grounds wrote that she lived with Hess on Humphrey Road in Platte City, and that on January 1, 2001, he "shoved me down the stairs." On January 11, 2001, she wrote, Hess "threatened to kill me, swung a crow bar at me, threw a phone hitting me in the face and causing injury." On the part of the form that asks why she's afraid of Hess, she wrote, "He threatened to kill me. He's mad because I'm leaving him and buying a house. [He] tore up my check so I can't close on a house tomorrow morning. I'm trying to get back on my feet and get out and it's making him crazy. I've never seen him threaten or act violent like this until recently."

See the petition for order of protection after the jump:

From MySpace

Shell Gifford and Dennis Hess

​People miss Dennis Hess. That's something that ought not get lost in all the drama and litigation detailed in this week's feature.

Last summer, Tiffany and David Cox and Deann Leddick were among the assorted friends who shared their memories of Hess and the good times they had at Denim & Diamonds with The Pitch.

Tiffany and David Cox met at Denim & Diamonds when David was a manager there. Tiffany had been a regular long before she was of legal age to drink, and remembers how, on her 21st birthday, Hess put her in the nightclub's "jail" and made her drink a bottle of Sex on the Beach mix as mock-punishment.

The Coxes celebrated their wedding and every anniversary at Hess' bar. This year marked their 11th anniversary -- the first time they celebrated elsewhere.

The phrase "Got a minute?" was so closely associated with Hess that mourners had it printed on T-shirts to wear at Hess' memorial. David Cox explains, "If you were a guy, it could be, 'Got a minute? Look at that girl's ass.' Or if you worked for Dennis and you got, 'Got a minute?' it could be your ass."

Leddick breaks in, laughing. "That doesn't mean he hadn't just said, 'Got a minute?' to 10 other people about the exact same thing. He'd tell me some gossip and say, 'Don't tell anyone,' and 10 minutes later I'd hear him telling the exact same story to someone else."

David Cox continues, "The thing is, with Dennis, he always made you feel important. When he was talking to you, he was focusing on what you were saying. Even if it was just crap. ... He'd talk to a rich person the same way he talked to a poor person, an ugly person the same as a good-looking person. He'd go up to the ugliest woman and say, 'Hello, gorgeous, you looking for a man? Because you look good tonight.' He liked to make everyone feel better about themselves, no matter what was going on in their lives."

Craig Wolfe, another former Denim & Diamonds manager, says, "Dennis is Denim & Diamonds. I mean, he built it. He made everybody feel like they belonged there."

This week's Martin column notes the similarities in the arguments for a new convention hotel and past discussions that led to unprofitable investments in Bartle Hall and other tourism bubbles.

The oft-contested surface lot near 12th and Broadway

​One of the sites that's being contemplated for a new hotel sits west of Bartle Hall and south of 12th Street. The property is not much to look at -- surface parking lots rarely are -- but it has a tumultuous history.

A California-based investor named Allan Carpenter and a partner, Dale Fredericks, bought the property in 1985. In the early '90s, they tried to convince the city it was an ideal spot for, yes, a convention hotel.

The Carpenter-Fredericks team had competition in the form of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, who controlled a partnership that sought to develop a convention hotel at the south end of Bartle Hall. City officials mulled the Perot proposal for years before concluding that it relied too heavily on taxpayer support.

Southeast Community Center

​Fitness facilities aren't known for their art work. Generally speaking, gyms aren't prized for their architectural aesthetic, either. But the Southeast Community Center, perched above 63rd Street at the edge of Swope Park, inspires residents to sweat in style.

The $10.5-million work-out and meeting space opened less than a year ago and it's still one of the city's greenest public facilities. Designed to LEED Silver standards -- a long acronym that basically means national experts have signed off on the building's environmental attributes -- the Southeast Community Center has a rain garden blanketing its north slope and a big native-plants patch hugging the front entrance. Generous windows fill the 47,000-square-foot space with natural light instead of fluorescent glare and even the bathrooms engage in water-saving tactics.

When I took a peek inside, during my canvas of 63rd Street, I discovered that even the art is eco-inspired.

The employees behind the scenes of 2nd Chance Thrift Store have an impossible task.

Photo by Camille Brecht

Workers at 2nd Chance have a daunting task

​Boxes the size of refrigerators are stacked 15 feet high, brimming with clothing and shoes. Smaller containers are crammed with random housewares, from books to bath towels. The entire length of the massive warehouse looks like its been slammed by a cardboard avalanche -- an avalanche that unleashes a fresh deluge every time an inch of space is cleared away.

But the workers here aren't overwhelmed. As I discovered when I stopped at 2nd Chance on my trip down 63rd Street, many of them have lived through far more challenging circumstances.

​Anastasia Hope's words are iced with sugary defiance. Smiling sweetly behind a desk heaped with used paperbacks and hard-cover books, she doesn't need any provocation to emphasize that she isn't in the business of irony. Within moments of walking into her cozy shop on my journey down 63rd Street, she hits me with a preemptive strike.

"Everybody thinks people in Raytown don't read, that Raytown is full of rednecks," she says.

Reality is quite the opposite.

Anastasia's Books is surviving -- thriving, even.

In the fiery debate over how to manage the deer in Shawnee Mission Park, Randy Knight heard it all.

Nicole Reinertson

Randy Knight, community relations manager for JoCo parks

​One woman, who lives nearby, suggested scores of animal rights activists line up along the bank of the man-made lake and fan out methodically through the park, banging pots and pans to startle the deer out of the 1,200-acre green space.

Another resident proposed trucking in unseemly amounts of lion manure from the Kansas City Zoo, spreading it around Shawnee Mission Park and repelling the deer with the stench of their predators' poop.

Most famously, the members of Bite Club of KC, submitted the concept of a Deer Auto-Assembler, which would create a deer preserve, possibly with an observation tower for animal-loving tourists.

Knight, community relations manager for the Johnson County Park and Recreation District, listened to them all. Personally, he hoped park officials would find a way to handle the deer without killing them. When the district decided the only viable option was a harvest with sharpshooters and bow hunters, Knight took plenty of abuse -- one angry resident accused him of being an evil Republican on par with former vice president Dick Cheney.

But the outrage and the bloodshed might be a one-year affair.

When members of Bite Club of KC made their case to stop the deer harvest planned for Shawnee Mission Park, they often conjured gruesome imagery.

Ken Payne, president of Heartland Suburban Whitetail Management

​Addressing the Johnson County Board of Park and Recreation Commissioners in recent months, animal rights activists predicted terrified, half-dead deer, with arrows stuck in their anatomy, bolting into traffic or dragging their bloodied bodies onto family doorsteps.

They suggested that deer corpses would be abandoned, scattered to rot in the woods, and the family park would reek like a slaughterhouse.

One activist predicted that area children would be traumatized by the sight of such carnage and the local school district would have to contend with a rash of behavioral problems.

Ken Payne, president of Heartland Suburban Whitetail Management, scoffs at such predictions.

"It's amazing how some people have just lost touch with reality," Payne says.

Shortly before midnight on September 30th, Jason Miller wrote an e-mail to his supporters. "Let us grieve for the deer who will die tomorrow," he said, "but continue to fight relentlessly for those who remain alive."

​This week, I wrote about Miller, the founder of Bite Club of KC, and the battle to save the deer at Shawnee Mission Park. Earlier this year, officials with the Johnson County Park and Recreation District determined the deer herd had grown so large that the animals were threatening their own survival -- and the survival of other species -- in the 1,200-acre green space.

The hunt didn't start on October 1, as Miller's e-mail feared, but the sharp-shooting could begin before the end of this week.

That's not the end of this story, though.

Before he opened the door to his garage, revealing the key prop for his "shocking" stunt on September 25, Jason Miller was kind enough to ask me if I'm squeamish. (Answer: Yes, very.) Luckily, by the time I'd watched the animal rights activist arrange the severed deer head in a wicker basket, I had become immune to the oozing neck wound and was able to record Miller's display in front of the administration office of Johnson County Park and Recreation District.

But wait, there's more! Read the full account of Miller's crusade in this week's feature, "There Will Be Blood."

When the deer harvest in Shawnee Mission Park turned into a gigantic controversy, Johnson County Park and Recreation District officials got decidedly tight-lipped with activists and the media about when the hunt will begin. Get ready for gunshots, folks. Today, officials sent the following letter to neighbors of the 1,200-acre park. 




As for the controversy, check back tomorrow for the full story in the October 8 issue of The Pitch.

​This week's Martin column describes a $421,200 subcontract that a politically connected consultant, Gayle Holliday, received after the City of Kansas City, Missouri, reached an agreement with an Arizona company to install red-light cameras.

Holliday, who is African-American, represents the lone "minority business enterprise" (MBE) that the camera company, American Traffic Solutions, says it intends to use in the course of executing its contract. Through July, Holliday had been paid a mere $8,512.50, according to the city.

The arrangement raises questions. Why did the city approve a plan to use women and minorities that sets aside 13 percent of the value of the contract for a consultant whose expertise is of questionable relevance? And why, 14 months later, had she received only 2 percent of the money?

I complain in the column that city officials did not respond to requests for comment. In fact, Phillip Yelder, the city's director of Human Relations, the department which oversees minority contracting, did respond. But his e-mail arrived after my deadline.

Jennifer Silverberg

Darryl Burton in 2004

His name may still be new to Kansas Citians, but in St. Louis, our colleagues at the Riverfront Times have been reporting on the saga of Darryl Burton, the subject of last week's feature story, since 2004.

Click here to read Malcolm Gay's story, "A Shot in the Arm," published in November 2004.

Click here to read Gay's follow-up on prison snitch Claudex Simmons, who, had he not made up testimony in order to squeal his way out of jail, may have served full sentences for his own crimes and never had the chance to kill Affton Fire Chief Gerald Buehne while fleeing police in a March 2005 car chase.

And click here to read Nick Lucchesi's interview with Burton shortly after he was freed last year.

Missouri DOC

Claudex Simmons

​Cyara Whitlock is the daughter of Claudex Simmons, the snitch who lied about seeing Darryl Burton commit a murder for which Burton was sentenced to life in prison.

Simmons is currently serving a life sentence at the Southwest Correctional Center in Charleston, Missouri, for second-degree murder in the death of Fire Chief Gerald Buehne, who was killed in a head-on collision with Simmons as Simmons fled police in a PT Cruiser after shoplifting at a Walgreens in 2005. With the help of a public defender in St. Louis, Simmons' case is on appeal.

The following email exchange between Burton and Simmons' daughter, Whitlock, is pretty amazing (read it after the jump):