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Homeowner Sounds Off: Rioters Threatened To Kill Us, Take Our Home; Rifle Only Thing That Saved Us

   DailyWire.com
Armed homeowners standing in front of their house along Portland Place confront protesters as they march to Mayor Lyda Krewson's house on Sunday, June 28, 2020, in the Central West End in St. Louis.
Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Mark McCloskey, the armed homeowner who went viral on Sunday night after he and his wife defended their property from rioters, said during an interview on Monday that the rioters threatened him and his family and that his rifle was the only thing that saved him.

McCloskey, who is a lawyer, noted in an interview with a local news station that the rioters broke down a gate to the community and illegally trespassed on their private property.

“I went inside; I got a rifle … because as soon as I said ‘this is private property,’ those words enraged the crowd,” McCloskey said. “Horde, an absolute horde came through the smashed-down gates, coming right at the house. … And then I stood out there, the only thing we said is, ‘This is private property, go back, private property, leave now.’ At that point, everybody got enraged, there were people wearing body armor.”

“One person pulled out [some] loaded pistol magazines and he clicked them together and he said, ‘You’re next,'” McCloskey said. “We were threatened with our lives, threatened with the house being burned down, my office building being burned down, even our dog’s life being threatened. It was about as bad as it can get. You know, I really thought it was the storming of Bastille, that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a huge and frightening crowd and they broke in the gate and they were coming at us.”

McCloskey said that the damage to the gate was so severe that the community’s trustees had to come out and use chains to put the gate back up, and that it was “broken physically in half.”

“There’s nothing public in Portland Place. Being inside that gate is like being in my living room,” McCloskey said. “It was a big crowd and they were aggressive, wearing body armor and screaming at us and threatening to harm us and how they were going to be living in our house after they killed us.”

McCloskey said that he has received death threats from the incident and slammed the fringe activists, who were protesting the city’s mayor for doxxing residents who support defunding the police, for engaging in hypocrisy by doxxing him and his family.

“It is interesting to me that the very people that are asking the mayor to resign for doxxing people have now put all of my information all over the web, everywhere in the world,” McCloskey said. “Is there some hypocrisy there?”

“The only thing that stopped the crowd from approaching the house was when I had that rifle and I was holding it,” McCloskey later said. “That was the only thing that stemmed the tide.”

McCloskey later torched the fringe activists, saying, “There’s mayhem in the city every night, you never hear about it, there will be dozens of shootings, multiple deaths, no one seems to care about those black lives, but, you know, it’s when there [is] political capital to be made from somebody’s death, that death matters, no other life matters that I can see.”

“You know, I do civil rights cases,” McCloskey continued. “Right now I’m representing a young man who was assaulted by the police who’s sitting in prison right now for being involved in a car accident after which the police came and assaulted him. It’s on video. I’m not some kind of extreme, you know, anti-Black Lives Matter guy. I do these cases, I’ve been doing them for decades. I mean, I have on the wall of my conference room, I’ve got an anti-slavery broadsheet, the abolitionist broadsheet from 1832 has been there as long as I’ve owned this building. I mean, I’m not the enemy of people that really care about black lives, but I’m apparently the enemy of the terrorists and the Marxists that are running this organization.”

WATCH:

Related: Black Lives Matter-Led Drive To ‘Defund The Police’ Also Targets Capitalism

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