KMOV reporter Jordyn Burrell opened her recent report like the kind of local tragedy that feels too cruel to be random, because it begins with a simple human impulse most people recognize: seeing someone out in the cold and deciding you can’t just drive past.
Police say William Palmer was shot and killed early Sunday morning in downtown St. Louis, and Burrell’s reporting paints the picture of a man whose kindness wasn’t occasional or performative, but habitual, to the point that the people closest to him worried it would someday get him hurt.
His fiancé, Riyen Jones, told Burrell she used to warn him all the time not to pick up people on the side of the road anymore, because he did it constantly – if he saw someone walking, she said, he’d pick them up and take them as far as he could…