It was not an attempt at a mass shooting. The assailant did not even aim at anyone in particular.
But the bullet that tore through the second-floor window behind the City Council table during a regular Monday-night meeting on May 8, 1989, was Saginaw’s closest encounter with modern-day gunplay tragedies. Mass shootings, rare in the old days, started to riddle the nation during the close of the 20th century and have endured with growing frequency into the 21st.
The main topic 35 years ago was supposed to be another General Motors tax abatement, but a middle-aged landlord angrily complained about code enforcement inspectors and his profanity reached a point where the mayor, Del Schrems, ordered a five-minute break. The Police Chief escorted the man out of Council Chambers, down the steps and out the rear door.
As the recess continued, about 50 officials and attendees commiserated about the incident. Suddenly, an explosive sound rang out, glass shattered and a pair of council members, Gary Loster and John Dankert, shouted “get down” and “hit the floor.” (Both were Vietnam vets, Loster the former Buena Vista police chief and Dankert an active sheriff’s deputy.)
Loster looked through the Venetian blinds and in the side parking lot across Holland Avenue, he spied a pickup truck peeling out onto South Washington in the direction of Hoyt Park. The meeting then was canceled as stunned participants gathered their wits and their belongings.
An hour later, police found the pickup parked at an Old Town tavern, with a shotgun still in the cab and the 44-year-old white male indoors, still engaged in his drinking binge, apparently oblivious that law enforcement would be in pursuit. His incarceration consisted of time in jail and then in a mental health facility.
There was not an ensuing call for a mass police presence at future meetings, a decade before the tragedy at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School brought “mass shooting” to the nation’s enduring vocabulary. Council meetings in 2024, now as then, still are conducted with one officer at the entrance, which is one more than usual than at other governmental gatherings across our metro area.
One change is that the window panes behind the table have been bullet-proof since May 1989, a lingering result of a bad day that could have been far-far worse.
Loster, who was new on the Council at the time and later served eight years as mayor, said:
“His demeanor was not normal, You could see his temper rising, and the weird way he looked at the cameras. I said to myself, ‘Something’s not right with this guy.’ ….I thought he might try to do something. We were all blessed.”
As for myself, the first thought when the landlord was evicted from the meeting was, “Did his extreme cursing make it onto the telecast?” SETV had started only a couple years earlier, and the response was that there was an instant cutoff switch, but no seven-second delay to block the four magic syllables from reaching the airwaves.
Of course, within moments this inquiry became irrelevant to the shooting story, but otherwise the presence of public access was quite important to yours truly. During the break time, when the bullet passed two feet over the back of a seated Mayor Schrems’ head, instead of first checking the broadcast booth, probably I would have been hovering over the top of him, notepad in hand. A couple feet up higher.
As Mayor Loster said: “I guess these things can happen anywhere, anytime you leave home.” If only but for fortune. That was half of my life ago.
Since 1989, the lone violence at a City Council meeting was in 2006, when an SVSU student was tasered by an officer in a dispute over wearing his cap inside the Chambers,
In 1980, a local legal aid attorney was forcibly removed from the audience when he declined to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
