BonnerSprings.com

A week after her home had all its windows broken, walls riddled with holes and most of its contents rendered unusable, Patricia Thomas is keeping her sense of humor.

It was Thomas' trailer, 3 Beach St., Edwardsville, in which Steven McDougal, her ex-boyfriend, holed up in for nine hours on Sept. 1. During that time, police had fired, by Thomas' count, 52 canisters of tear gas into the residence, broke every window and ended the standoff by plowing a battering ram into the right-rear side of the home.

"I heard he was passed out (from the tear gas)," Thomas said of McDougal, by the time a massive hole was punched into the trailer.

She laughs as she recounts that she'd heard McDougal woke up at that point, saying "Oh, man!" when he saw the "tank poking through."

"If I don't chuckle about it, I'll cry," Thomas said.

Facing what she estimates is at least $10,000 in damage, Thomas said her insurance company told her that her homeowner's insurance "didn't cover a tank going through the house."

Thomas and her 12-year-old daughter are staying with friends, having left the house before the Sept. 1 incident with little more than the clothes on their backs. Everything with fabric on it inside the home must be thrown away because of the tear gas.

That leaves her kitchen table and chairs, a coffee table, and maybe her daughter's dresser salvageable, she said. Everything else - all their clothes, the couch, the carpeting, the beds, linen, towels - must be discarded.

Broken glass, broken pieces of furniture and white dust cover the horizontal surfaces inside. The large-screen, plasma TV is cracked and the door on the side of the house is crumpled and twisted. Boards cover all the spaces where windows had been.

Thomas and her daughter had just moved into the place a month before the incident, from Geneseo, Kan. Thomas was at the trailer Tuesday for the first time since Sept. 1, mainly to get an urn containing the ashes of her husband who had died 10 months ago.

Eight days previously, after first seeing just the holes in the side of the house punctured by tear-gas canisters, Thomas said, "I thought I was gonna collapse" when she got inside.

Inside the trailer on Tuesday the air was still thick enough with tear gas to burn one's nostrils.

"I'm glad no law enforcement was hurt," she said, but "they could've used more force on him and less on my house."

Of McDougal, she said, "He's got it easy now. Better than I do. He's got a bed, clean clothes and three hot meals. I get to clean up destruction."

Thomas said the incident had started the day before, Sunday, Aug. 31, when McDougal had come to pick up some of his belongings. He found her in Overland Park and "yanked her out of the truck" she'd been in with a friend, she said. He was drunk and left, she said. Thomas decided that she and her daughter would spend the night at a friend's. Then McDougal called her at about 11:30 p.m., and said he was going to commit "suicide by cop," she said.

"The next call I get is friends telling me to turn on the TV," Thomas said.

That was about 3 or 4 a.m., she said, when a television news station was covering the standoff between McDougal and police.

Edwardsville police had responded to a call at about 1:30 a.m. Sept. 1, at Thomas' residence, found nothing happening, and returned at about 2:55 a.m.

Thomas said it was then McDougal's brother who was taken away by the police after he'd appeared on the inside porch.

Believing a female was in the home, with a possible hostage situation going on, Edwardsville Police Chief Mark Mathies said the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department's Tactical Unit was called in to lead police response.

After tear gas failed to flush McDougal, a military personnel carrier outfitted with a battering ram was borrowed from the Lenexa Police Department.

Thomas said she saw on the video shown on the television news that the ram had hit her house three times. The count of 52 tear-gas canisters she said she overheard from a police officer on the scene. All the canisters had been picked up by police, she said.

On Tuesday, holes were still visible on the sides of the house, which were made when the canisters were shot through the walls.

It was Edwardsville police officers who boarded up the broken windows to secure the house, she said.

"He's done so much destruction," she said of McDougal. "Yet no one's there to help me pick up the pieces. It's like 'OK, we're done,'" referring to police help after the incident.

As for getting any assistance repairing her home, Thomas said the Edwardsville Police Department told her, "I just had to sue him (McDougal)."

Given that he's likely going to prison, she said, and earning at best 30 cents a day, that doesn't seem worth the effort.

Still, she and her daughter have received some help from the community. A local church provided clothes for her daughter and her school gave her a backpack full of school supplies.

Her daughter is "doing good," Thomas said, and hasn't missed any school.

As Thomas was talking outside, her daughter, looking like any carefree child enjoying a sunny day, passed with several friends riding bicycles on Beach Street.

"She's a tough kid," Thomas said, though "she was shocked" when she first learned of the incident.

This weekend Thomas and some friends will come back to her home and try to vacuum up the tear-gas dust.

A single mother relying on disability payments from Social Security, Thomas said she welcomed offers of anyone willing to help with repairs or money. Having just moved, Thomas said she'd already been "kind of tapped out" financially. Anyone wanting to help out with time or money can reach her at (620) 257-8486.

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