Workers scurry for cover in BB battle
By Bill Bryan
Of the Post-Dispatch
08/02/2004
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Marietta Young peered out the glass door of her office at an unnerving sight. Pacing in the hallway of the upscale office building in west St. Louis County, just a couple of feet away, was a man wearing a blue shirt and holding a pistol.
"I didn't know what to think, but it was scary," said Young, a receptionist for the Tom James Co., a clothier. "At one point he stopped and peeped at me."
Young hid under her desk and asked her boss to call the police.
Other people in the building had also spotted the gunman Friday afternoon and called for help as well. St. Louis County police rushed to the scene, ready for a violent confrontation.
Officers arrived to find six to eight women hiding in cars, in closets and under desks at the three-story brick building at 12101 Woodcrest Executive Drive, just off of Olive Boulevard, west of Interstate 270. Some told police they had seen two men with handguns.
As police searched, they were met by Melinda Hagaman, who works at a business in the building; she told them not to worry.
"I knew it had to be the lawyers from down the hall," she said in an interview Monday. "They had done this before."
Police said they discovered that two lawyers who work in the building apparently had engaged in a BB gun fight with each other. Police arrested one of them, Gary K. Burger, 37, and booked him on suspicion of flourishing a dangerous and deadly weapon, a felony. Police have not yet sought formal charges from the prosecutor's office.
Burger refused to talk to the officers, police said, but the BB pistol, which they said looks like a real gun, was seized.
Police had been unable to locate the other lawyer, and he has not been arrested. But a case against him will be presented to the prosecutor at the same time as the case against Burger, said a county police spokesman, Officer Mason Keller.
Neither lawyer was available for comment Monday.
Hagaman said she had sought out Burger later Friday and told him that police were looking for him. She said he left and then returned and talked with officers.
Burger specializes in personal injury, auto accidents, workers' compensation and medical malpractice cases.
Hagaman, 25, said she immediately knew what was going on Friday because she got caught in a crossfire between the BB-fighting lawyers about a month ago. "I was outside on a break and I got shot in the finger and shoulder," she said.
"Boys will be boys, but I was mad," she said. "I grabbed one of their guns and shot back at them."
Hagaman did not appear to still be angry when interviewed Monday, but she said she can understand why others panicked.
"I can see where somebody could get freaked out, seeing the gun," she said. "That's understandable."
Reporter Bill Bryan:
E-mail:
bbryan@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8950
