Pleasant Hill grocery store shooting hits close to home. ‘It can happen anywhere’
Editor's Note: They did so bearing not only food, but also prayers, shock and sad resignation over the inevitability of violence in any community.
Dana Rogers on Tuesday sat at Price Chopper, in the cab of her truck, and called the shooting “surreal.”
No crime tape remained. A black latex glove police use to gather evidence lay on the blacktop. There otherwise was no sign that a crime had occurred on the Monday holiday.
Rogers, who works for animal control, heard of the shooting, shortly after it happened when the word “shots fired,” came across her police radio in the late afternoon.
“It’s just very surreal,” she said, knowing, as she stated. “It can happen anywhere.”
Pleasant Hill, Missouri
It can happen even in a relatively small town like Pleasant Hill, with barely 9,000 residents, where the last killing was recorded some 20 years ago.
If Pleasant Hill is known for anything, other than being a quiet town, it is for its connection to the Katy Trail, and as the home of the National Weather Service forecasting station whose warnings scroll beneath the television during thunderstorms and possible tornadoes. Its weather tower, sometimes called the “soccer ball in the sky,” stands like a watchtower along Route 7.
When Rogers, 45, moved in as a child in the 1980s, there were maybe 3,500 residents. “It was so easy to know everyone in town there,” she said, as small-town residents often say. Even if that is no longer the case, she said, there is still maybe two or three degrees of separation between most everyone.
“I didn’t personally know anyone,” involved in the shooting, Rogers said, although she does know the police chief and officers who responded. Her brothers, she said, knew Coon, who was killed. Her nephews knew her children. “I’m just saying there’s always that connection there.”
Rogers also works a part-time job at a gas station. She used to wait on the alleged shooter, Allen Prince, 27, of Pleasant Hill.
Charged with one count of first-degree murder, three counts of armed criminal action and two counts of first-degree assault, Prince is in police custody in the intensive care unit of a local hospital, following a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
A motive for the shooting is still under investigation.
“I think if it had been a robbery, or a domestic violence, I think, you know, that doesn’t make it right,” Rogers said, “but it puts things into perspective. But just the randomness of this, it’s weird.”
Wonderful, caring people
Sharon Wallace, a resident for more than 20 years, rolled her shopping cart out of Price Chopper on Tuesday.
The afternoon prior, when she heard about the shooting, she said she immediately called her neighbor, a young man who works at the store, to make sure he was unharmed, which he was.
That’s how familiar everyone is with everyone, she said.
Wallace spoke of how, on certain occasions, “when the mood strikes us” she and her best friend, Sheila, will enter the store and sing to the staff and customers.
“We’re not good, but we’re cheap,” she said, “and we will sing to everybody that works in there. You walk away, and they’re smiling, and you’re smiling. And we asked the manager, ‘Any complaints?’ and he goes, ‘No, but you got a lot of compliments.’”
Wallace said of Pleasant Hill, “It is town full of wonderful, caring people, and if you need help, anybody in this town may show up at your door.” When her husband, Richard, died in January 2024, after 57 years of marriage, “I’ll tell you what, if it wasn’t for my neighbors, my girlfriends that live here, I wouldn’t have made it. ...
“So when I heard about this (the shooting) I was shocked. I know all the kids that work in there. It’s a terrible thing. There are a lot of sick people. He needs to be prayed for too,” Wallace said of Prince, the alleged shooter. “It’s not always the easiest thing to say.”
‘Easy to be hateful these days’
Cindy Hunsaker, the floral manager at Prince Chopper said mutual concern runs deep.
“Everybody — the customers, the employees — they’re all checking on everybody else. Everybody is very concerned, sending prayers to the families, They seem to really, really be concerned, as they should.
“It’s pretty horrible. That’s not the type of thing that a close-knit community really is used to.”
She said she had no hesitation about showing up for work Tuesday morning.
“No, I didn’t,” she said, ”because, you know, you can’t really control anything. You can just pray for the people that they can get through it, the people that are living with the tragedy from now on. For us, it’s over pretty quickly, but you have the boy in the hospital, the woman who was killed, and her family, is what really should be the focus.”
No one anticipated that Memorial Day would unfold as it did, she said.
“I don’t think anyone would ever have expected it,” she said. “But when someone is not right in their thoughts, you can’t predict anything.”
She added, “We make it too easy to be hateful these days. It is an accepted norm that is unacceptable. It is. I mean, you hear our politicians talk hate and spew venom. And you hear our leaders spew venom. This is what comes of it. ...
“We are supposed to be able to argue, we’re supposed to be able to disagree. That’s what we are — a country of people who don’t think the same, and that’s okay, as long as it isn’t hurtful.
“But we’re getting past that, where hurtful is acceptable, and it’s not.”
