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The St. Louis, Mo., couple who went viral after staring down a group of protesters from their front porch have agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges in connection with the incident, pay fines and lose the guns seized during the investigation.
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two attorneys in their 60s, were charged in the summer of 2020 after a swarm of Black Lives Matter protesters broke down an iron gate and ignored a "No Trespassing" sign on their private street. The couple said they felt threatened and armed themselves before heading outside to warn off the crowd, which was on its way to the former mayor’s home. No one was hurt.
"They dropped all the weapons charges and they charged me with the lowest level of misdemeanor, which is something called assault four, which alleges that I purposely placed at least one other person in apprehension of immediate physical injury," Mark McCloskey told Fox News over the phone after returning from court Thursday. "I said, ‘Well, I guess I did. That was all point of the guns.’"
Patricia and Mark McCloskey draw their firearms on protestors as they enter their neighborhood during a protest against St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. June 28, 2020. Picture taken June 28, 2020. REUTERS/Lawrence Bryant (Reuters)
McCloskey said he will pay a fine of $750, and his wife will pay an additional penalty on a different misdemeanor charge. He said they planned to pay them off Friday.
"It’s the value of the Second Amendment," McCloskey said. "It’s kind of humorous for me at any rate, the charge they finally settled on for me, because it’s exactly what I did do. That’s the whole point of the Second Amendment. We stood out there with guns, and that placed them in imminent fear of physical injury, and they back off."
The couple’s guns, seized after their initial arrests last year, will be destroyed, even though McCloskey’s attorney asked in court for the judge to allow his rifle to be donated to a charity auction.
"The good news is we’re not in front of charges now, so I don’t have any problem getting myself another AR," he said.
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The end result is what should have happened from the get-go if the incident hadn’t been politicized by the local prosecutor, McCloskey said.
"If we didn’t have somebody named George Soros in the world, we never would have been charged with anything," he said.
The case’s initial prosecutor, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, was sidelined by a judge and replaced with a special prosecutor after flaunting the ongoing proceedings in fundraising emails.
