On May 16, when an EF3 tornado ripped through the St. Louis area and left destruction and death in the wake of its 23-mile-long path, court buildings in the city and St. Louis County were unscathed.
But hundreds of people associated with the criminal legal system — attorneys, defendants, judges and court personnel alike — suffered damage to their homes or offices. The aftermath left many scrambling to pick up the pieces.
It was around 2:45 p.m. on that Friday when the emergency alerts began blaring from the phones of defense attorney Jerryl Christmas and his colleagues at his law firm in the city’s West End neighborhood.
Most people continued working. Christmas happened to look out the window.
“A lot of times there will be trash on Delmar because a lot of people are going up and down the street,” he said. “I could see the trash spinning around in a funnel. And I was like, ‘Oh s----, we’re in a tornado for real.’”
Christmas and his colleagues rode out the storm huddled in the center of their office. When it passed, he headed out to check on a family home about three miles away.
The 118-year-old building in the Lewis Place neighborhood was still standing but had suffered severe damage. Christmas knew it would take a few days to get everything sorted out, so he immediately reached out to prosecutors and judges to reschedule his cases.
“And fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of people were having issues that they had to deal with,” he said. “So the court was very understanding.”
None of Christmas’ clients was impacted by the storm in a way that affected their court cases. But the same was not true for hundreds of other defendants.
About a quarter of the clients helped by the Bail Project through June had been affected by the storm in some fashion, said William Newsome, its former operations director. The organization helps individuals facing low-level criminal and municipal charges in St. Louis County bond out of jail and get connected to social services.
“You now have some people who are figuring, am I going to deal with this legal situation, or I'm going to deal with trying to get my family safe? And a lot of them are choosing to be stable in their living conditions and kind of, and I hate to say it that way, throw away the legal side of things,” he said.
One client, Newsome said, had to choose between moving from a storm-damaged home and paying for his required GPS monitoring. And making the wrong choice in the eyes of the court can lead to a person being in violation of requirements of pretrial release or probation. That can prompt a judge to issue an arrest warrant.
Newsome said he was surprised by how lenient judges were in St. Louis County. In St. Louis, the response was more mixed, said Matthew Mahaffey, the lead public defender in the 22nd Circuit.
While some judges were willing to hear why a client had missed a curfew or failed to charge a GPS device, he said, others immediately issued a violation — putting clients “either in warrant status or on notice that they need to come in.”
“It wasn’t a universal approach, but it did create problems for clients when they couldn't comply and we were unable to get a hold of them,” Mahaffey said.
The public defender’s office worked to get clients who had been picked up on those warrants back out of jail, Mahaffey said, but it wasn’t easy. Social service agencies were overwhelmed following the storm, and some were trying to repair their own damage. The aftermath of the storm also made it harder for Mahaffey and others to get clients out of jail who were not already on pretrial release.
“There was just so much housing that was destroyed that the options available for a lot of our clients who had family that would have allowed them to come and stay with them, those didn’t exist anymore,” he said.
For individuals with previous convictions on their record, recovery was even harder.
LaShay Wallis was at work when the storm blew through. Her teenage daughter was at the home they shared with others in the Greater Ville neighborhood.
“She called me on FaceTime and said, ‘Our porch flew off in the middle of Natural Bridge,’” Wallis said.
She knew instantly they would have to find another place to live.
“Our roof was pretty gone. We had a lot of water damage, clothes ruined, TVs, furniture,” Wallis said.
Wallis sent her daughter to live with friends while she stayed in shelters and tried to find a place to rent. But the two nonviolent felonies on her record from more than a decade ago make finding housing tricky even in the best of times. It took until July to find a landlord who was willing to rent to her and secure the money needed for the move.
She and her daughter still need a few more pieces of furniture, but Wallis said the apartment in the Gravois Park neighborhood feels like a place they can call home for a while.
“I'm comfortable here, and we like our neighbors, and it's quiet,” she said.
