State Police completes investigation of Belleville firefighter with hammer
Illinois State Police has completed its investigation of a Belleville firefighter accused of threatening a St. Louis delivery driver with a hammer and turned the case over to the St. Clair County state’s attorney’s office.
It isn’t known what investigators concluded.
“This case is still open,” Illinois State Police spokeswoman Melaney Arnold wrote in an email on Friday. “ISP has submitted its investigation to the State’s Attorney’s Office, but because it is still open, we’re unable to release any reports at this time.”
On Monday, Chris Allen, spokesman for State’s Attorney James Gomric, declined to comment.
At least two Belleville residents showed up at a special meeting of the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners on Monday due to concern about the case. Cassandra Bahre, 36, who works in health technology, made a brief statement, calling the firefighter’s behavior “unacceptable.”
“We have to hold our firefighters and police officers accountable for this type of behavior,” she said after the meeting. “He took a sledgehammer and brandished it at (the delivery driver). He was under no threat.”
The incident occurred on Saturday, Aug. 16, on Roan Hill Drive, near Turkey Hill, in Belleville.
An off-duty firefighter called police to report that a woman was driving recklessly in his neighborhood by speeding and running stop signs, according to Police Chief Matt Eiskant. The woman, who works as a delivery driver, also called police to report that a man had come after her with a “sledgehammer.”
The delivery driver used her cellphone to record the incident and posted it on social media. It shows firefighter Kyle Biermann, husband of Belleville City Treasurer Sarah Biermann, shouting outside her rolled-up window. He reportedly told police he was holding a ball-peen hammer because he was working on a home project.
Kyle Biermann hasn’t been charged with a crime.
Eiskant asked Illinois State Police to investigate the incident, saying it’s common for his department to turn over cases involving city employees to neutral third party agencies.
On Monday, Assistant Police Chief Mark Heffernan declined to comment on the investigation results after the special meeting of the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners.
“We gave the case to the Illinois State Police to avoid any conflicts of interest, so I would defer to their spokesperson for any comment about the case,” he said.
Belleville Fire Chief Curt Lougeay, who started the job on Aug. 21, also declined to comment, calling it a “personnel matter.”
Scheduling of the board’s special meeting on Monday had led some people on social media to assume that commissioners were planning to discuss the Aug. 16 case.
The meeting agenda stated that the board would go into closed session to discuss the “appointment, employment, compensation, discipline, performance, or dismissal of specific employees or collective negotiation matters” and that the session could be followed by a “possible motion for disciplinary action.”
Commissioners went into closed session for about five minutes, then voted to table any action. Attorney and former St. Clair County Judge Bill Stiehl, who serves as board chairman, said assumptions about the closed-session topic had been wrong.
“I think a lot of people thought this was going to be regarding one particular item, and it wasn’t that at all,” he said. “The reason for a special meeting was because we believed we had a matter that really needed to be taken up before the next regularly scheduled meeting, and it turns out that is no longer the case.”
Heffernan said one reason for the special meeting was to ask the board to recommend promotions for Detective Tyler Schwarz and Officer Ron Funk to sergeant so they could be voted on at Belleville City Council’s next meeting on Sept. 15.
A Facebook news site called VOP (Voice of the People) STL News told the delivery driver’s story in a lengthy post on Aug. 19 that included two videos she had provided.
One 28-second video shows a man standing outside her vehicle on the passenger side. He leans down, looks through the windshield, points across the street and says, “That is very illegal.”
The man then walks around the vehicle to her rolled-up driver’s-side window and appears to be shouting, although his words are indecipherable. He’s holding a ball-peen hammer by the head in his left hand.
“(He) just ran into my car, tried to hit my car with his thing in his hand,” the woman can be heard saying. “Look at him. Look at him. Look at him. Look at him. I don’t even know this white man. I don’t even know him. I don’t know him at all. Don’t know him.”
As the delivery driver pulls forward, the man walks along the vehicle and then behind it, continuing to shout, his image getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
According to the VOP Facebook post, the delivery driver alleged that the firefighter was “banging on (her vehicle’s) window with a sledgehammer” and that later he came out of his house with a gun in his hand when she circled around the block to meet with police.
Eiskant said the initial Belleville police investigation found no evidence of the firefighter having a gun, and the woman’s vehicle showed no sign of damage from a hammer.
The second video included some of a discussion between the delivery driver and two Belleville police officers who responded to the 911 calls.
“I told you to stop talking and let me finish,” one officer can be heard saying at the beginning of the video, which runs 2 minutes and 17 seconds. “I’ll answer your questions.”
At one point, the delivery driver is having a phone conversation. She expresses outrage that the officers aren’t arresting the firefighter.
“Basically, they say he ain’t doing nothing wrong by coming up to my car with a sledgehammer. He free to do what the hell he want to do,” the woman told the person on the phone, prompting one of the officers to say, “That’s not what’s being said to you.”
Eiskant said the second video was selectively edited to make it seem like the first officer was being rude to the delivery driver, when actually he was just trying to get her to stop interrupting him long enough to explain something, and that police body-camera footage showed that police did an “incredible job” at the scene.
