Although the Kansas City Police Department has not officially said the van reportedly used in the murder of Kansas City attorney Tom Pickert was registered to 79-year-old businessman David Jungerman, local newscasts have made that claim, and there is reason to believe it is true.
Just last week, Jungerman was served with a garnishment order to pay $5.75 million to a homeless man he shot in the leg. The man, Jeffrey Harris, was caught stealing copper wire from one of Jungerman’s facilities. Pickert represented Harris. As recounted by Missouri Lawyers Weekly, Pickert summed up the case, “A verdict for (the man) is giving him and others like him permission to take the law into their own hands, to be judge, jury and executioner. That’s not the way our society works.”
Jungerman chose to be his own attorney and, as the saying goes, proved he had a fool for a client. His ornery streak got him in the news in 2010. He painted a message on the side of an 18-wheeler trailer that read, “Are You A Producer Or Parasite/ Democrats–Party Of The Parasites.” He parked on his property alongside what was then US-71 about an hour south of Kansas City. On May 12 of that year someone torched the sign and torched it again a week later. Someone also burned down Jungerman’s empty farmhouse.
The irony is that Jungerman was not exactly a Republican. With a fondness “for old-fashioned Harry Truman Democrats,” he admitted to voting for Claire McCaskill in 2006. His mistake, he admitted, was not specifying that he was speaking only about national Democrats. “They’re more conservative than many Republicans,” he said of local Democrats. “I should have put an ad in the paper to explain that. No, I meant the national Democrat parasite base that is sucking this country dry.”
Local Democrats did not exactly condone the arson, but they came close. “This man has a right to do what he did,” said Kay Caskey, a Bates County Democrat and wife of longtime state Sen. Harold Caskey, “but around here some people might wonder at what point do you cross the line?”
